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On Getting Better
  • Published: 1 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241541883
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $30.00

On Getting Better

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From the UK's foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling companion to On Wanting to Change that asks what it means to get better

To talk about getting better - about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer - is to talk about pursuing the life we want; in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from or come out of what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.)

How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future?

In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.
  • Published: 1 February 2022
  • ISBN: 9780241541883
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $30.00
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About the author

Adam Phillips

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 The Life You Want, On Giving Up and On Getting Better. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.
AP

Also by Adam Phillips

On Giving Up
The Life You Want
On Wanting to Change
Attention Seeking
In Writing
Unforbidden Pleasures
One Way And Another
See all

Praise for On Getting Better

Improvisatory and energetic, buoyed by thought-enacting questions and self-qualifications . . . His writing is as much literary-critical as psychoanalytic, as likely to invoke Shakespeare or Emerson as Freud or Lacan . . . What one goes to his writing for - and what it often delivers - are arresting, renewing paraphrases that divert you from your overfamiliar tracks

New Statesman

On Getting Better, a companion volume, questions what we really mean when we talk about improving our internal lives and how it always begins in an idealised version of ourselves. Philips is an erudite and highly engaging writer: how, he asks, can we manage change when it "precipitates us into an unpredictable future?"

Guardian