We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can’t.
In Adam Phillips’s view, there are two things that get in the way: memory and imagination. He explains that “we give up or give something up, when we believe we can no longer go on as we are. Yet truly moving on is difficult, because while one might give up on a specific ambition – like a banker who once wanted
to become an astronaut – the memory of having had that ambition, of having once envisioned that alternative reality, typically remains”.
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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: 5 hours and 10 minutes
