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 essay collection, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.
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This is a wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had... These essays won’t cure us, but they may make us curious.
Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post
Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.
Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
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Length: 4 hours and 10 minutes
