On Wanting to Change

Jan 11, 2025 10:42 AM

Author:Adam Phillips

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.

Reviews

Phillips 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

Annabelle Williams demolishes the idea that women are just worse at negotiating pay, or choose low-wage industries

—— The Times

Sets out to get to the bottom of why the modern world is rigged unfairly in men's favour.

—— Stylist

My Grandmother's Hands invites each of us to heal the racial trauma that lives in our bodies. As Resmaa Menakem explains, healing this trauma takes courage and a commitment to viscerally feel this racial pain. By skillfully combining therapy expertise with social criticism and practical guidance, he reveals a path forward for individual and collective healing that involves experiencing the sensations of this journey with each step. Are you willing to take the first step?

—— Alex Haley, Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing

Blends psychology and self-help to prove how doubt, failing, and rethinking are instrumental to improving ourselves and our world. . . . In three sections, he outlines why we struggle to embrace feedback, how we can help others rethink effectively, and how our communities can shift to encourage rethinking

—— Business Insider

Grant is a born communicator-engaging and impossibly articulate. . . . Think Again . . . digs into the synaptic weirdness of why we think how we do and how we know what (we think) we know. The bottom line: In a world that's constantly changing, we could all benefit from deliberately reassessing our cherished opinions

—— Goodreads user

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