Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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.
Trade ReviewPhillips at his most brilliant * Financial Times *
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 *
A mediation on the powerful fantasy of change * Times Literary Supplement *
An inspiring vision of psychoanalysis * Guardian *
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 *
