On Wanting to Change
1st Edition
Published on 18. March 2021
160 pages
978-0-241-97922-8 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
File size
0,38 MB
ISBN-13
978-0-241-97922-8 (9780241979228)
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.
