On Wanting to Change
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  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241291771
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $21.00
Categories:

On Wanting to Change

Formats & editions
Paperback
16 Jun 2021
EBook
18 Mar 2021
Audiobook
18 Mar 2021
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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.
  • Published: 16 June 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241291771
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $21.00
Categories:

Also by Adam Phillips

On Giving Up
On Getting Better
Attention Seeking
In Writing
Unforbidden Pleasures
One Way And Another
Missing Out
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Praise for On Wanting to Change

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

Phillips at his most brilliant

Financial Times

An inspiring vision of psychoanalysis

Guardian

A mediation on the powerful fantasy of change

Times Literary Supplement

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