The Life You Want
Published on 29. January 2026
Book
Hardback
160 pages
978-0-241-76611-8 (ISBN)
Description
'Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating' Deborah Levy
What does it mean to 'get a life' in a culture in which there is so much to want?
And why do the lives we think we need so often fail to satisfy?
With his characteristic curiosity, warmth and perceptiveness, Adam Phillips addresses one of the key perplexities of modern life, which is that we are all the products of the families or social groups we grow up in: they shape us selectively and guide us to their preferred ways of living; but we then spend our lives haunted by the aspects of ourselves that they have ignored.
We conform and yet we rebel. So, the lives we want for ourselves are likely to be a difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental. And, necessarily, we all must make things up as we go along.
What is to be done? The answer, Adam Phillips suggests, is to pay especially close attention to what interests us, excites us and frightens us; to make an experiment of living; and thereby to discover the life we want - and whether it is viable.
'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville
What does it mean to 'get a life' in a culture in which there is so much to want?
And why do the lives we think we need so often fail to satisfy?
With his characteristic curiosity, warmth and perceptiveness, Adam Phillips addresses one of the key perplexities of modern life, which is that we are all the products of the families or social groups we grow up in: they shape us selectively and guide us to their preferred ways of living; but we then spend our lives haunted by the aspects of ourselves that they have ignored.
We conform and yet we rebel. So, the lives we want for ourselves are likely to be a difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental. And, necessarily, we all must make things up as we go along.
What is to be done? The answer, Adam Phillips suggests, is to pay especially close attention to what interests us, excites us and frightens us; to make an experiment of living; and thereby to discover the life we want - and whether it is viable.
'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville
Reviews / Votes
[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . The title may sound like classic January self-help, but let's be clear: Phillips is not actually going to teach you how to get the Life You Want. Rather than giving us a list of improving life hacks he sets off interesting trains of thought about what a good life might look like, and leaves us to do with them what we will . . . Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out - it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice. Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin * The Times * Adam Phillips wages a playful war on the strictures of traditional talk therapy . . . Phillips has spent decades translating specialized concepts for general audiences-demystifying transference and projection, peeking under the hood of everyday occupations such as tickling and being bored, drawing on classic works of literature to illustrate the relevance of his field to ordinary experience . . . he often adopts an impish persona . . . His wordplay is sporadically self-delighted; his pose of guileless receptivity . . . The Life You Want is a sort of dream work, which synthesizes opposing elements into a poetic, if wishful, whole * New Yorker * If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it's Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city's artists and writers-and a cultural figure in his own right-best known for books with titles that sound suspiciously enjoyable for someone paid to dissect the psyche: Going Sane, On Giving Up, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. His latest, The Life You Want, offers no five-step plan to happiness. Instead, it asks the irritatingly good question: Why are you so desperate for a better life in the first place? -- Hermione Lee * Interview Magazine * A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life * Kirkus Reviews *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 220 mm
Width: 142 mm
Thickness: 21 mm
Weight
266 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-76611-8 (9780241766118)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.