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On Getting Better

byAdam Phillips

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To talk about getting better - about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer - is to talk about pursuing the life we want; in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from or come out of what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.)

How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future?

In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.
Improvisatory and energetic, buoyed by thought-enacting questions and self-qualifications . . . His writing is as much literary-critical as psychoanalytic, as likely to invoke Shakespeare or Emerson as Freud or Lacan . . . What one goes to his writing for - and what it often delivers - are arresting, renewing paraphrases that divert you from your overfamiliar tracks
New Statesman

About Adam Phillips

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 Giving Up, 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.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9780241541883
  • Length: 176 pages
  • Dimensions: 181mm x 11mm x 111mm
  • Weight: 102g
  • Price: £8.99
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