Description

Book Synopsis

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.



Trade Review
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

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    Order before 4pm tomorrow for delivery by Tue 23 Jun 2026.

    A Paperback / softback by Adam Phillips

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      Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
      Publication Date: 11/11/2021
      ISBN13: 9780241541883, 978-0241541883
      ISBN10: 0241541883

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      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.



      Trade Review
      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 *

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