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On Wanting to Change by Adam Phillips
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On Wanting to Change

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Narrator John Sackville

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Length 3 hours 49 minutes
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

From 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.

ยฉ Adam Phillips 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

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 On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

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Reviews

Phillips at his most brilliant 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 A mediation on the powerful fantasy of change An inspiring vision of psychoanalysis A response to the times we live in . . . an urgent invitation for a different kind of conversation His style of psychoanalytic writing refreshingly lacks the usual heaviness and homage to the master Expand reviews