[]
The Life You Want
  • Published: 29 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405979252
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160

The Life You Want

Formats & editions
Hardback
28 Jan 2026
EBook
29 Jan 2026
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on how to achieve the lives we want

Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do – and fail to do – about actually getting them?

In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of.

Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.
  • Published: 29 January 2026
  • ISBN: 9781405979252
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

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
On Getting Better
On Wanting to Change
Attention Seeking
In Writing
Unforbidden Pleasures
One Way And Another
See all

Praise for The Life You Want

[Reading The Life You Want] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . . . 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

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

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

New Yorker

Phillips asks what it means to want to live at all—and what happens to wanting under conditions that increasingly dictate what a life should be

Cultured

Phillips offers a subtle but devastating critique of the notion that we 21st-century decadents can be fulfilled by things

Stuart Jeffries, Telegraph