Phillips both kindles optimism and chastens it, attuned to human possibility yet acutely aware of inevitable frustrations.
On Getting Better collects five essays in which Adam Phillips examines what people mean when they speak of getting better, in psychoanalysis and in ordinary life. Published by Penguin in 2021 as a companion to On Wanting to Change, it treats cure less as an outcome than as a way of talking, asking what the wish to improve commits a person to and where our pictures of a good life come from.
Phillips argues that any account of change draws on what has already been lived, so wanting to be different carries us toward a future we cannot picture. He reads the analytic relationship as one without coercion, indoctrination or teaching, and gives the essay on not having experiences to the work of missing those one loves and needs.
For clinicians, it reopens familiar questions about the aims of treatment and the ambivalence folded into the wish to get better.
About the author
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British psychoanalyst and essayist working within the psychoanalytic tradition. He served as principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, he has written many books, among them On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, and Becoming Freud, and is known for essays that bring psychoanalytic thinking to a general readership.
Details
- 2021
- Penguin
- Penguin
- 176
- 9780241541883