On Wanting to Change
On the wish for transformation and what psychoanalysis makes of wanting to change.
An inspiring vision of psychoanalysis.
On Wanting to Change gathers Adam Phillips's reflections on the wish for transformation and what psychoanalysis makes of it. Phillips sets the stories people tell about their lives, either as progress or as decline, against the changes they actually undergo, and shows how rarely the two keep pace. Wanting to change, he argues, is as much a matter of how a person describes their wanting as of any change itself, and it runs up against how little anyone can finally know about what they want.
Working within the object-relations tradition, Phillips draws on Winnicott's account of conversion and dependence, on William James's divided self, and on writers from Wallace Stevens to Wittgenstein. The result reads more as an essay in thinking than a clinical manual, attentive to the fantasies of self-improvement that surround the consulting room.
For the practising clinician, it offers a way of holding a patient's stated wish to change alongside the uncertainty beneath it. Penguin published the book in 2021.
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
- 160
- 9780241291771