On Wanting to Change

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy.

We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.

So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together . . .

This sparkling book is about that fact.

© Adam Phillips 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • Phillips at his most brilliant

    Financial Times

  • One moment, the ideas are clear and thrilling; the next, multi-clause, ludic sentences snare the reader in a web of complexity . . . [Phillips] draws nimbly on a wide hinterland of authors – from the poetry of Wallace Stevens to the philosophy of Wittgenstein, from Howard’s End to Moby Dick

    Tablet

  • A mediation on the powerful fantasy of change

    Times Literary Supplement

  • An inspiring vision of psychoanalysis

    Guardian

  • A response to the times we live in . . . an urgent invitation for a different kind of conversation

    Prospect

  • His style of psychoanalytic writing refreshingly lacks the usual heaviness and homage to the master

    Inside Story

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