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The Life You Want
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on how to achieve the lives we want
Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do – and fail to do – about actually getting them?
In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of.
Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.
'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville
Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do – and fail to do – about actually getting them?
In The Life You Want Adam Phillips uses psychoanalytic and literary approaches to show that we are obsessed by the idea of our lives being ones we want and enjoy rather than merely endure, tolerate or make the most of.
Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.
'One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time' John Banville
160 pages, Hardcover
Published March 31, 2026
About the author
Adam Phillips
131 books739 followersAdam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.
Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."
Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
April 15, 2026
Phillips is a great entry-point into psychoanalytic thinking (differentiating here between the actual theory and the method of thinking), even if he is a bit of an iconoclast. Bookended by the two strongest essays, this book provokes some interesting thoughts, namely: can you actually know what you want? Don't we actually work very hard to avoid learning what we want? good fodder to chat with your analyst about
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July 8, 2026“Without always knowing what they are doing, the people who look after children — mostly the parents, but not always — recognize and sustain the parts, the versions, the aspects of the child they prefer, and disapprove or ignore whatever it is about the child they find unacceptable, too disturbing, too exciting, too enjoyable, too destructive. We then spend our lives seeking recognition for, and avoiding recognition of, the aspects of ourselves that our parents — and the societies they are part of — couldn't face.” -p.2
“Rorty wants to tell us that ‘As Harold Bloom tells us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self' (‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre').” -p.13~14
“The death of God being the death of anybody knowing who we are, and what we should want and do. Choosing a life, and knowing who we are and what to do, being something you can only do in language.” -p.29
“If we treat escapism as the curiosity born of necessity, it immediately becomes less diminishing. In our escapism, the joke may not be on us.” -p.32
“The horror of this paranoid Picture of human beings — invented, it should be said, before, between and during two devastating world wars — went a long way to conceal the sometimes very real absurdity of it all: the absurdity of being the only animal that wants to escape from what it happens to be, of our not having the wherewithal to do the very thing we are supposed to do, survive and reproduce. The absurdity and terror of the phobic life, of modern life as phobia.” -p.34
“Wittingly, and mostly unwittingly, we begin something, something that matters to us begins. And everything begins before its discernible beginning.” -p.39
“I think we should think of psychoanalysis as, among many other things, the science and art of unpredictable side effects. That is, it is a treatment that provides the setting for side effects, that cannot — and therefore must not — be predicted. That's what it is for there to be what Ferenczi called 'a dialogue of unconsciouses’. So in the finding and founding of psychoanalysis, Freud crosses a threshold from science to literature, and from traditional medicine to something else; and we, following on, cross the threshold from psychoanalysis as a cure to psychoanalysis as the setting for unpredicted and unpredictable side effects; as a paradoxical treatment that in aiming to heal, or cure, or diminish suffering also aims to have unpredictable consequences that by definition cannot be described or accounted for before they happen. And in one sense can't, by definition, be aimed for.” -p.49
“[P]sychoanalysis could help people to enjoy thresholds, and consider them; consider them as opportunities and possibilities. And to enjoy thresholds you have to learn to enjoy bearing contradictions rather than trying to resolve them.” -p.50
“And we are always, in psychoanalysis, negotiating the difference between improvisation and error; but it may be that psychoanalysis is one of the best places for this particular negotiation. Knowing what we are doing and knowing what we are talking about, in any absolute sense, of course, being the first casualties of a commitment to psychoanalysis.” -p.61
“[T]he onus, so to speak, is more on the listener than the lecturer, who has only to show us his chaos; but the onus on the listener is not one of effort, or concentration, but of a yielding, of allowing oneself to be affected. Of a willingness not so much to take things in — as though being lectured to or taught was a benign form of force feeding — but to notice what is happening to oneself, to find oneself picking things out. Not only confirming and consolidating an already supposedly known self, but also allowing for a wish to be surprised. To notice what you find yourself noticing. You should be no more able to predict the effect on you of a lecture than you could predict your dream tonight from the day you have just spent. The lecture may or may not set something off in you.” -p.68~69
“The point for Rorty is that we have our own purposes, while the point for Winnicott is that we have our own developmental incentives. For Rorty, as a pragmatist, we need to work out what twe need and want to do in order to get the lives we want; for Winnicott, as a child analyst, we have to do what we can, knowing ourselves to be largely unconsciously motivated, to find and make the environment that will enable the growth of what he calls our true selves. For Winnicott, we are living, given a chance, a biologically based, developmental determinism; for Rorty, we are doing everything we can to make ourselves into the kind of people we want to be, living the kinds of lives we want. For Rorty, we are interested only in what is useful for our own purposes; for Winnicott, we are preoccupied by what will facilitate our development.” -p.73
“And so [Montaigne’s] analogy for learning — an analogy that recurs in psychoanalytic writing — is digestion; the child changes the substance and form of what he is given, and all in the service of his nourishment and growth (force feeding would be the enemy of this process; and by the same token, force feeding is perhaps the best analogy for malign teaching, or indeed for malign relationships of any kind).” -p.78
“But what Winnicott is developing here is the idea that every child can develop their own idiosyncratic personal morality if they are given what he calls a facilitating environment (and when he calls it a chance to evolve in a personal way, he reminds us of the contingency of the whole process). We may think that moral education involves learning the moral precepts and standards and assumptions of our society; that moral education is a hopefully benign kind of conformism, something that by definition involves a consensus among a group of people, however different they in fact are. ‘Immorality for the infant', Winnicott then writes startlingly, ‘is to comply at the expense of the personal way of life.’ We need to be able to tell the difference between a consensus, a like-mindedness, and an enforced consensus, the difference between choice and intimidation. The worst thing we ever do, Winnicott intimates, is betray ourselves through conformity. The best thing about us, in his view, is our developing a personal way of life that is essentially a personal morality. What is traditionally referred to as moral education — the learning and internalizing of moral rules and principles so they become second nature — can be, in his view, a distortion of our development; a sabotage, a waylaying, a distraction. Each person, given the chance, has their own developing, individual, eccentric morality; this is an extraordinary idea, the idea that one of the differences between ourselves and others is our particular moral sense.” -p.80
“How could anybody know beforehand who someone is and therefore who they should become? How could anybody know, in any absolute sense, what is good for someone else?” -p.81
“So irreverence is a form of recognition and a form of idealism; I, in my irreverence, am going to expose what is wrong with this, what is ridiculous, grandiose, tyrannical, self-important and silly — and I am going to propose, either explicitly or implicitly, something better. It is an attempt, the irreverent believe, to make a better world, and a critique of the world as it is.” -p.94
“Irreverence, one can say, at its best warns us of the dangers of self-importance; self-importance as a particularly unattractive and self-starving form of narcissism.” -p.96
“Our irreverence, which, when it is not omnipotent and therefore cruel itself, shows us that there is no such thing as omnipotence and it's a good thing too. That our self-importance exposes our absolute and founding unimportance; that there may be something better to be than important (our importance can only isolate us, because it denies our dependence). And that we may need perhaps to acknowledge that whatever else it is, our good irreverence is potentially full of hope and full of humour, and that the two things go together.” -p.98
“When irreverence is not, in the best sense, playful, it legitimates atrocity.” -p.98
“To imagine not being born, then, is to imagine ceasing to imagine. But otherwise the possibility of not having been born is not remotely like the certainty of dying; the two non-existences could not be more different because one includes having lived.” -p.103
“We can, of course, only muse on not being born — and perhaps because we can only muse on it, it may be unusually inspiring, productive, a good way of wondering about what matters to us, if anything, about being alive.” -p.103
“The fantasy of not having been born allows us, apparently, to float free of these questions about wanting. As if to say, the life you want is one in which this can't and won't be thought about, is actually of no interest. The life you want is, in fact, one in which you have supposedly solved the problem of wanting, by making it irrelevant, literally beside the point. Indeed, the phrase 'getting the life you want' obscures in its promise and enthusiasm just how difficult wanting can be, in both its imagining and its realization. This is the difficulty and the draw we are born into.” -p.106
“Freud's psychoanalysis, at its best, is an experiment in finding out what the worst may be for any individual, and about what a full look at the worst might entail, might involve; and what, if any, the benefits may be of doing so.” -p.116
“So Rorty counsels us that his preferred question about what we might make of ourselves replaces what he refers to as ‘bad questions', like 'What is being?’, 'What is really real?’ and 'What is man?’ And these traditional, grandiose philosophical questions are bad because they run the risk, from Rorty's point of view, of being simply in pursuit of essences rather than experiments in living. That they are, as I say, about supposedly discovering something rather than making something, and the putative answers to these questions are supposed to, or can all too easily be wanting to, put a stop to something rather than opening something up. These questions, in all their apparent rhetorical gravity, may be there — though Rorty doesn't say this — to murder possibility; may indeed be our way of murdering possibility under the cover of pursuing profound questions.” -p.118
“Resistance is at once recognition (of something or other) and a fantasy of catastrophe; indeed, when one resists something or someone, one has always fast-forwarded to the impending catastrophe. The catastrophe of submitting to or complying with something fundamentally unacceptable. Or, as we shall see, one is actually in the process of finding something out. Resistance as a form of curiosity.” -p.122
“We are full of sentences, and phrases, and words that we dare not speak, even to ourselves. And as with all strong censorship, it never occurs to us that we are being censored. Successful censorship is never experienced as censorship.
In the psychoanalytic story, all resistance is originally or eventually resistance to speaking, resistance to language. And this is of course our testament to the power of language, and to the power of resistance: their power for us. From a psychoanalytic point of view, language and resistance are inextricable. And in this essay I want to consider some of the starling consequences of this apparently simple fact, the fact that language, among other things, is what we resist. As the poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote, ‘Who knows what we miss through not having spoken?’” -p.124
“But resistance as research, preparation, examination, curiosity is the precondition, the starting block, for any possible new and potentially satisfying experience.” -p.145
“Dissolving the super-ego means, in Emerson's words, doing one's own thing, living one's life in one's own way, as a vocation; following one's inclination and curiosity and refusing to be intimidated, being able to make experiments in living.” -p.145
“As though our resistance is integral to our singularity. It shows us that desiring is something we can only really do in our own time, partly because we are always tempted to resist desire, or to take refuge in desiring only what others want us to desire; and so it takes time, and is an ongoing project, to find the singularity and the courage of one's wanting. Impatience, Kafka wrote, is our original sin. Our frustration, or our apparent inability to bear it, can make us compliant, what Ferenczi calls 'polite'. As though compliance is like a magic cure for both frustration and impatience, a handing ourselves in to the authorities, the authorities who require us to be well behaved. Complying is what we do when desiring seems too dangerous and too difficult.” -p.146
“Our resistance is like a probe to find out what the analyst will make of our resistance, and what this will reveal him to be (authoritarian or kind, say, impatient or flexible). We resist people, in this story, as a provocation, as a way of getting them to reveal themselves.” -p.147
——————
9/10.
“Rorty wants to tell us that ‘As Harold Bloom tells us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self' (‘Philosophy as a Transitional Genre').” -p.13~14
“The death of God being the death of anybody knowing who we are, and what we should want and do. Choosing a life, and knowing who we are and what to do, being something you can only do in language.” -p.29
“If we treat escapism as the curiosity born of necessity, it immediately becomes less diminishing. In our escapism, the joke may not be on us.” -p.32
“The horror of this paranoid Picture of human beings — invented, it should be said, before, between and during two devastating world wars — went a long way to conceal the sometimes very real absurdity of it all: the absurdity of being the only animal that wants to escape from what it happens to be, of our not having the wherewithal to do the very thing we are supposed to do, survive and reproduce. The absurdity and terror of the phobic life, of modern life as phobia.” -p.34
“Wittingly, and mostly unwittingly, we begin something, something that matters to us begins. And everything begins before its discernible beginning.” -p.39
“I think we should think of psychoanalysis as, among many other things, the science and art of unpredictable side effects. That is, it is a treatment that provides the setting for side effects, that cannot — and therefore must not — be predicted. That's what it is for there to be what Ferenczi called 'a dialogue of unconsciouses’. So in the finding and founding of psychoanalysis, Freud crosses a threshold from science to literature, and from traditional medicine to something else; and we, following on, cross the threshold from psychoanalysis as a cure to psychoanalysis as the setting for unpredicted and unpredictable side effects; as a paradoxical treatment that in aiming to heal, or cure, or diminish suffering also aims to have unpredictable consequences that by definition cannot be described or accounted for before they happen. And in one sense can't, by definition, be aimed for.” -p.49
“[P]sychoanalysis could help people to enjoy thresholds, and consider them; consider them as opportunities and possibilities. And to enjoy thresholds you have to learn to enjoy bearing contradictions rather than trying to resolve them.” -p.50
“And we are always, in psychoanalysis, negotiating the difference between improvisation and error; but it may be that psychoanalysis is one of the best places for this particular negotiation. Knowing what we are doing and knowing what we are talking about, in any absolute sense, of course, being the first casualties of a commitment to psychoanalysis.” -p.61
“[T]he onus, so to speak, is more on the listener than the lecturer, who has only to show us his chaos; but the onus on the listener is not one of effort, or concentration, but of a yielding, of allowing oneself to be affected. Of a willingness not so much to take things in — as though being lectured to or taught was a benign form of force feeding — but to notice what is happening to oneself, to find oneself picking things out. Not only confirming and consolidating an already supposedly known self, but also allowing for a wish to be surprised. To notice what you find yourself noticing. You should be no more able to predict the effect on you of a lecture than you could predict your dream tonight from the day you have just spent. The lecture may or may not set something off in you.” -p.68~69
“The point for Rorty is that we have our own purposes, while the point for Winnicott is that we have our own developmental incentives. For Rorty, as a pragmatist, we need to work out what twe need and want to do in order to get the lives we want; for Winnicott, as a child analyst, we have to do what we can, knowing ourselves to be largely unconsciously motivated, to find and make the environment that will enable the growth of what he calls our true selves. For Winnicott, we are living, given a chance, a biologically based, developmental determinism; for Rorty, we are doing everything we can to make ourselves into the kind of people we want to be, living the kinds of lives we want. For Rorty, we are interested only in what is useful for our own purposes; for Winnicott, we are preoccupied by what will facilitate our development.” -p.73
“And so [Montaigne’s] analogy for learning — an analogy that recurs in psychoanalytic writing — is digestion; the child changes the substance and form of what he is given, and all in the service of his nourishment and growth (force feeding would be the enemy of this process; and by the same token, force feeding is perhaps the best analogy for malign teaching, or indeed for malign relationships of any kind).” -p.78
“But what Winnicott is developing here is the idea that every child can develop their own idiosyncratic personal morality if they are given what he calls a facilitating environment (and when he calls it a chance to evolve in a personal way, he reminds us of the contingency of the whole process). We may think that moral education involves learning the moral precepts and standards and assumptions of our society; that moral education is a hopefully benign kind of conformism, something that by definition involves a consensus among a group of people, however different they in fact are. ‘Immorality for the infant', Winnicott then writes startlingly, ‘is to comply at the expense of the personal way of life.’ We need to be able to tell the difference between a consensus, a like-mindedness, and an enforced consensus, the difference between choice and intimidation. The worst thing we ever do, Winnicott intimates, is betray ourselves through conformity. The best thing about us, in his view, is our developing a personal way of life that is essentially a personal morality. What is traditionally referred to as moral education — the learning and internalizing of moral rules and principles so they become second nature — can be, in his view, a distortion of our development; a sabotage, a waylaying, a distraction. Each person, given the chance, has their own developing, individual, eccentric morality; this is an extraordinary idea, the idea that one of the differences between ourselves and others is our particular moral sense.” -p.80
“How could anybody know beforehand who someone is and therefore who they should become? How could anybody know, in any absolute sense, what is good for someone else?” -p.81
“So irreverence is a form of recognition and a form of idealism; I, in my irreverence, am going to expose what is wrong with this, what is ridiculous, grandiose, tyrannical, self-important and silly — and I am going to propose, either explicitly or implicitly, something better. It is an attempt, the irreverent believe, to make a better world, and a critique of the world as it is.” -p.94
“Irreverence, one can say, at its best warns us of the dangers of self-importance; self-importance as a particularly unattractive and self-starving form of narcissism.” -p.96
“Our irreverence, which, when it is not omnipotent and therefore cruel itself, shows us that there is no such thing as omnipotence and it's a good thing too. That our self-importance exposes our absolute and founding unimportance; that there may be something better to be than important (our importance can only isolate us, because it denies our dependence). And that we may need perhaps to acknowledge that whatever else it is, our good irreverence is potentially full of hope and full of humour, and that the two things go together.” -p.98
“When irreverence is not, in the best sense, playful, it legitimates atrocity.” -p.98
“To imagine not being born, then, is to imagine ceasing to imagine. But otherwise the possibility of not having been born is not remotely like the certainty of dying; the two non-existences could not be more different because one includes having lived.” -p.103
“We can, of course, only muse on not being born — and perhaps because we can only muse on it, it may be unusually inspiring, productive, a good way of wondering about what matters to us, if anything, about being alive.” -p.103
“The fantasy of not having been born allows us, apparently, to float free of these questions about wanting. As if to say, the life you want is one in which this can't and won't be thought about, is actually of no interest. The life you want is, in fact, one in which you have supposedly solved the problem of wanting, by making it irrelevant, literally beside the point. Indeed, the phrase 'getting the life you want' obscures in its promise and enthusiasm just how difficult wanting can be, in both its imagining and its realization. This is the difficulty and the draw we are born into.” -p.106
“Freud's psychoanalysis, at its best, is an experiment in finding out what the worst may be for any individual, and about what a full look at the worst might entail, might involve; and what, if any, the benefits may be of doing so.” -p.116
“So Rorty counsels us that his preferred question about what we might make of ourselves replaces what he refers to as ‘bad questions', like 'What is being?’, 'What is really real?’ and 'What is man?’ And these traditional, grandiose philosophical questions are bad because they run the risk, from Rorty's point of view, of being simply in pursuit of essences rather than experiments in living. That they are, as I say, about supposedly discovering something rather than making something, and the putative answers to these questions are supposed to, or can all too easily be wanting to, put a stop to something rather than opening something up. These questions, in all their apparent rhetorical gravity, may be there — though Rorty doesn't say this — to murder possibility; may indeed be our way of murdering possibility under the cover of pursuing profound questions.” -p.118
“Resistance is at once recognition (of something or other) and a fantasy of catastrophe; indeed, when one resists something or someone, one has always fast-forwarded to the impending catastrophe. The catastrophe of submitting to or complying with something fundamentally unacceptable. Or, as we shall see, one is actually in the process of finding something out. Resistance as a form of curiosity.” -p.122
“We are full of sentences, and phrases, and words that we dare not speak, even to ourselves. And as with all strong censorship, it never occurs to us that we are being censored. Successful censorship is never experienced as censorship.
In the psychoanalytic story, all resistance is originally or eventually resistance to speaking, resistance to language. And this is of course our testament to the power of language, and to the power of resistance: their power for us. From a psychoanalytic point of view, language and resistance are inextricable. And in this essay I want to consider some of the starling consequences of this apparently simple fact, the fact that language, among other things, is what we resist. As the poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote, ‘Who knows what we miss through not having spoken?’” -p.124
“But resistance as research, preparation, examination, curiosity is the precondition, the starting block, for any possible new and potentially satisfying experience.” -p.145
“Dissolving the super-ego means, in Emerson's words, doing one's own thing, living one's life in one's own way, as a vocation; following one's inclination and curiosity and refusing to be intimidated, being able to make experiments in living.” -p.145
“As though our resistance is integral to our singularity. It shows us that desiring is something we can only really do in our own time, partly because we are always tempted to resist desire, or to take refuge in desiring only what others want us to desire; and so it takes time, and is an ongoing project, to find the singularity and the courage of one's wanting. Impatience, Kafka wrote, is our original sin. Our frustration, or our apparent inability to bear it, can make us compliant, what Ferenczi calls 'polite'. As though compliance is like a magic cure for both frustration and impatience, a handing ourselves in to the authorities, the authorities who require us to be well behaved. Complying is what we do when desiring seems too dangerous and too difficult.” -p.146
“Our resistance is like a probe to find out what the analyst will make of our resistance, and what this will reveal him to be (authoritarian or kind, say, impatient or flexible). We resist people, in this story, as a provocation, as a way of getting them to reveal themselves.” -p.147
——————
9/10.
February 23, 2026
I enjoyed very much the first half of the book. Then it got quite complex and difficult to get through. Sometimes Adam Phillips can become quite a bit dense as an author, with good reason, because it often comes with a lot of concentration of knowledge and reflexion. However, in the final paragraph on Resistances, for me the penny dropped. It collected the input from the rest of the book in such a way that has made a really massive difference on a personal level. I think this book has not only taught me a lot about a debate that I hadn't thought about, about what it means to want a life or how can you know what life you want or what does wanting a life mean, but also how that affects me. This book for me is a 5 out of 5 mostly because of its impact on me.
June 26, 2026
In a recent interview in The New York Times, David Marchese asks the actress Kristen Stewart a question taken directly, he acknowledges, from Phillips’ latest book: “What is it you don’t want to know about yourself?” (The question is actually Michael Serres’, but never mind.) What a truly bizarre question to ask a celebrity! (And what a dangerous question to ask yourself!) Stewart is audibly stumped. Later, in a follow-up to the interview, she confesses: “I’ve asked a lot of other people what their answers would be, and it is confounding. Nobody has one. There are so many ways to interpret what that means. Is there something that you don’t want to find out? Or is it something that you really do know in the depths of yourself but you’re avoiding?” Stewart’s evasions force Marchese, in a spirit of goodwill, to turn the question back on himself, asking: “Why did I not have the guts to try to be an artist earlier in my life?” Marchese doesn’t volunteer an answer to his own question. But it isn’t difficult to fabricate one: “I didn’t have the guts to be an artist because I secretly knew, without wanting to, that I was talentless.” I imagine that Phillips would respond to such a declaration with a challenge of his own: “Don’t let a lack of talent stop you from being an artist! Go ahead! Create [talentless] art! See what happens!”
That provocation is an example of a “pragmatic psychoanalysis” in action — or maybe, better yet, a “psychoanalytically informed pragmatism”. The life we HAVE is actually the life we WANT, a pragmatic psychoanalyst might say; we’re just unconscious of WHY we want it. (We are, in this telling, savvy, if oblivious, agents.) It is through “experiments in living” that we can change the parameters of our lives, and in doing so test the fidelity of our desires and anxieties, and the foci of our resistances. (Indeed, isn’t the greatest experiment in living, Phillips ponders elsewhere, to die, and then see what happens?)
If I am ever fortunate enough to meet Phillips I would like to ask him about his use of epigraphs: those terse quotations that stand as headers to his writings. What function do they serve? To me, they often seem only tangentially related to the work that follows. So they don’t seem to operate as announcements. I wonder if, instead, they are more backward-looking, more commemorative, marking a source of inspiration that is idiosyncratic and private. In a “Paris Review” interview, Phillips’ office is described as piled high with books, because Phillips is a voracious and eclectic reader. So, I romance, when a passage in some book at hand sparks a train of reasoning, Phillips must preserve that departure point with a kind of marker, a cairn that says: this is where I’ve come from, rather than, this is where I’m going. And that signpost is an epigraph.
That provocation is an example of a “pragmatic psychoanalysis” in action — or maybe, better yet, a “psychoanalytically informed pragmatism”. The life we HAVE is actually the life we WANT, a pragmatic psychoanalyst might say; we’re just unconscious of WHY we want it. (We are, in this telling, savvy, if oblivious, agents.) It is through “experiments in living” that we can change the parameters of our lives, and in doing so test the fidelity of our desires and anxieties, and the foci of our resistances. (Indeed, isn’t the greatest experiment in living, Phillips ponders elsewhere, to die, and then see what happens?)
If I am ever fortunate enough to meet Phillips I would like to ask him about his use of epigraphs: those terse quotations that stand as headers to his writings. What function do they serve? To me, they often seem only tangentially related to the work that follows. So they don’t seem to operate as announcements. I wonder if, instead, they are more backward-looking, more commemorative, marking a source of inspiration that is idiosyncratic and private. In a “Paris Review” interview, Phillips’ office is described as piled high with books, because Phillips is a voracious and eclectic reader. So, I romance, when a passage in some book at hand sparks a train of reasoning, Phillips must preserve that departure point with a kind of marker, a cairn that says: this is where I’ve come from, rather than, this is where I’m going. And that signpost is an epigraph.
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March 9, 2026Definitely not what I thought this was going to tackle but the read was nonetheless very interesting.
It gave me some nice insights about psychoanalysis which I find fascinating.
But I must say, it's noooo easy read at all, especially in English as it's not my native language.
It gave me some nice insights about psychoanalysis which I find fascinating.
But I must say, it's noooo easy read at all, especially in English as it's not my native language.
March 8, 2026
I really loved this - found it very prescient, accessibly written, really important for me to have read. I just wish it had had more of an “ending” - appreciate that this began, in part, as essays published elsewhere, but think it could’ve benefited from something to pull it all together a bit more.
May 4, 2026
Adam's Original Psychoanalytic Sin: Therapeutically, Always Inciting; Practically, Too Open-Ended
I love Phillips' plurality, openness, and meandering curiosity, but sometimes it leaves one feeling too open and visionless. Perhaps this is part of the problem and point of living in a post-Postmodern world—especially in the West, most especially in America: We must be endlessly skeptical about both our knowing critique and our ruthless optimism. American Pragmatism seems well-poised to straddle these contradictory modes, with its notion of usefulness tempering its radical critique of all essentialisms. And for that reason, I had high hopes for Phillips' latest work.
Phillips has engaged with American Pragmatism throughout his essayistic oeuvre, but never so explicitly as he lays it out in the prologue here:
The framing is an exciting incitement to leave behind much of the navel-gazing of psychoanalysis itself and enliven the enterprise of life with plurality, risk, experiment, and new vocabularies.
Unfortunately, the book seems more exacting on psychoanalysis and too open-ended when it comes to pragmatism's function, process, and promise. We get full sections without reference to pragmatism. The in-depth understanding and inquiry feels biased towards psychoanalysis, which makes sense given Phillips' background and is no great sin in itself, but seems to betray some of the prologue's framing of the book; the primary fiction here is still psychoanalysis. Pragmatism serves as an occasional foil or bolstering tool, but not a fully fledged fellow traveler. Moreover, as a pragmatist myself, I was hoping for more examples, extensions, fantasies, and visions of a life lived like a psychoanalytically informed pragmatist.
I suppose that's "the life I want," which I have to risk myself. I'll be the better for it, but more readers might have been better for it, too—especially in the psychoanalytic community—if Phillips had more explicitly and doggedly chased down the radical openness of pragmatic life, as it is actually lived, by himself or by patients.
———
Quotes
the phrase 'the life I want' also implies a stability and a degree of certainty in myself; the idea of the life I want fixes the flux of myself (5-6)
Becoming a pragmatist tells you nothing about what you will then become. Becoming a psychoanalyst can tell you too much about what you will and won't become. . . Put together, . . . pragmatism and psychoanalysis, in the best sense, can expose and renew each other. (24)
Part of the teacher's desire [could be] that what she teaches is transformed sometimes beyond recognition. The aim would not be, or would not only be, the performative one of being able to repeat or explain what one has supposedly been taught. The aim would be to turn the desire to imitate into the desire to improvise. The psychoanalyst and the pragmatist then as ask same question: how can I make the life I want out of what I happen to have been given, whether I wanted it or not? (87)
Good irreverence pays tribute to vulnerability (95)
I love Phillips' plurality, openness, and meandering curiosity, but sometimes it leaves one feeling too open and visionless. Perhaps this is part of the problem and point of living in a post-Postmodern world—especially in the West, most especially in America: We must be endlessly skeptical about both our knowing critique and our ruthless optimism. American Pragmatism seems well-poised to straddle these contradictory modes, with its notion of usefulness tempering its radical critique of all essentialisms. And for that reason, I had high hopes for Phillips' latest work.
Phillips has engaged with American Pragmatism throughout his essayistic oeuvre, but never so explicitly as he lays it out in the prologue here:
"The two main fictions informing this book — psychoanalysis and American pragmatism —assume that we are what we want, including, of course, the lives we want, but tell very different stories about what our wanting involves.
. . .
"For psychoanalysis, broadly speaking, the past is always our problem, always threatning to waylay not merely our prefered future, but any future at all. For pragmatism, everything depends on how we use the past to make the future we might want.
. . .
"[So] what is to be done is to discuss the lives we think we want; and in so far as we are able . . . to try them out. And to do this we have to, every so often, experiment rather than understand." (2-3)
The framing is an exciting incitement to leave behind much of the navel-gazing of psychoanalysis itself and enliven the enterprise of life with plurality, risk, experiment, and new vocabularies.
Unfortunately, the book seems more exacting on psychoanalysis and too open-ended when it comes to pragmatism's function, process, and promise. We get full sections without reference to pragmatism. The in-depth understanding and inquiry feels biased towards psychoanalysis, which makes sense given Phillips' background and is no great sin in itself, but seems to betray some of the prologue's framing of the book; the primary fiction here is still psychoanalysis. Pragmatism serves as an occasional foil or bolstering tool, but not a fully fledged fellow traveler. Moreover, as a pragmatist myself, I was hoping for more examples, extensions, fantasies, and visions of a life lived like a psychoanalytically informed pragmatist.
I suppose that's "the life I want," which I have to risk myself. I'll be the better for it, but more readers might have been better for it, too—especially in the psychoanalytic community—if Phillips had more explicitly and doggedly chased down the radical openness of pragmatic life, as it is actually lived, by himself or by patients.
———
Quotes
the phrase 'the life I want' also implies a stability and a degree of certainty in myself; the idea of the life I want fixes the flux of myself (5-6)
Becoming a pragmatist tells you nothing about what you will then become. Becoming a psychoanalyst can tell you too much about what you will and won't become. . . Put together, . . . pragmatism and psychoanalysis, in the best sense, can expose and renew each other. (24)
Part of the teacher's desire [could be] that what she teaches is transformed sometimes beyond recognition. The aim would not be, or would not only be, the performative one of being able to repeat or explain what one has supposedly been taught. The aim would be to turn the desire to imitate into the desire to improvise. The psychoanalyst and the pragmatist then as ask same question: how can I make the life I want out of what I happen to have been given, whether I wanted it or not? (87)
Good irreverence pays tribute to vulnerability (95)
May 27, 2026
What do I truly want in this life?
Yes, what is to be done? <-- main question
Swayed between 4-star and 5-star for a long time. I give it 4.5 stars.
4-star for its disconnectedness among the chapters. They were written not as a book but as articles for different publications.
5-star for the author's erudition, and kudos to him for reigniting my interest in Freud.
The book mainly pits Freud against John Rawls (the pragmatist).
So, from the Freud's view, the life we want is... : What you think you want is where the problems start.
and,
"...the life you want would be something you are by definition unconscious of - you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want; and the life you claim to want could only be wishful and transgressive, and if it is merely wishful, it is only a denial and repudiation of reality.
...the life you want needs to be interpreted - contained by psychoanalytic redescription - before it is pursued." (26)
Yes, the ultimate pessimist that Freud is...
He says that human animals are... more persecuted than sustained by their insistent desire. (Hence, maybe better to not know our desires.)
On the other hand, John Rawls is the ultimate pragmatist, an optimist likely to be welcomed with open-arms by liberal capitalists.
He says that nothing is useful unless we can "re-interpret" old values and sayings to fit our new living situations. Hence, his suggested advice to find the life we want is to try various things until we find out what we want and what we do not want. (Freud would say trying is meaningless.)
My notes:
- to notice what is happening to oneself... to notice what you find yourself noticing..
- New vocabs for the life I want... the 'idiosyncratic sensibility'
- Cioran: We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying.
- What do I have to do to keep going? ... the murdering of possibilities (is this murdering good or bad?)
- essences (Freud) vs. experiments in living (Rawls)
It is a philosophy book at its core, as it tries to define the essence of certain concepts, such as irreverence and resistance.
One other thing that stays with me (there are many many entertaining and thought-provoking ideas in this book, maybe there are too many, that they vie too much for my limited memory space, which doesn't end well) is on teaching and learning. This is mainly Freud and his followers speaking, but what gets effectively taught and stays taught lies more in learners than in teachers, which was a new insight for me, and which made me re-think how I should approach teaching. In order to be a good teacher, I really have to know what students bring to table, their mindset, their typical milieu, etc. in order to properly gauge what they can take away from the classroom. There were many good quotes on this perspective, but too lazy to find and write them here now...
I borrowed this author's another book called "Monogamy," apparently written when he was around my current age. The author is much older now.
Yes, what is to be done? <-- main question
Swayed between 4-star and 5-star for a long time. I give it 4.5 stars.
4-star for its disconnectedness among the chapters. They were written not as a book but as articles for different publications.
5-star for the author's erudition, and kudos to him for reigniting my interest in Freud.
The book mainly pits Freud against John Rawls (the pragmatist).
So, from the Freud's view, the life we want is... : What you think you want is where the problems start.
and,
"...the life you want would be something you are by definition unconscious of - you have worked very hard not to know what the life is you want; and the life you claim to want could only be wishful and transgressive, and if it is merely wishful, it is only a denial and repudiation of reality.
...the life you want needs to be interpreted - contained by psychoanalytic redescription - before it is pursued." (26)
Yes, the ultimate pessimist that Freud is...
He says that human animals are... more persecuted than sustained by their insistent desire. (Hence, maybe better to not know our desires.)
On the other hand, John Rawls is the ultimate pragmatist, an optimist likely to be welcomed with open-arms by liberal capitalists.
He says that nothing is useful unless we can "re-interpret" old values and sayings to fit our new living situations. Hence, his suggested advice to find the life we want is to try various things until we find out what we want and what we do not want. (Freud would say trying is meaningless.)
My notes:
- to notice what is happening to oneself... to notice what you find yourself noticing..
- New vocabs for the life I want... the 'idiosyncratic sensibility'
- Cioran: We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying.
- What do I have to do to keep going? ... the murdering of possibilities (is this murdering good or bad?)
- essences (Freud) vs. experiments in living (Rawls)
It is a philosophy book at its core, as it tries to define the essence of certain concepts, such as irreverence and resistance.
One other thing that stays with me (there are many many entertaining and thought-provoking ideas in this book, maybe there are too many, that they vie too much for my limited memory space, which doesn't end well) is on teaching and learning. This is mainly Freud and his followers speaking, but what gets effectively taught and stays taught lies more in learners than in teachers, which was a new insight for me, and which made me re-think how I should approach teaching. In order to be a good teacher, I really have to know what students bring to table, their mindset, their typical milieu, etc. in order to properly gauge what they can take away from the classroom. There were many good quotes on this perspective, but too lazy to find and write them here now...
I borrowed this author's another book called "Monogamy," apparently written when he was around my current age. The author is much older now.
July 5, 2026
If you are buying this book at random because of the title “The Life You Want,” I am sorry to say you won’t find answers there. And that being said, this is the purpose of psychoanalysis.
Now, being serious, I believe psychoanalysts or people (like me) interested in the topic will take more advantage of this book. This is my first Phillips’ book, although I know the author for other titles. Also, Being new to analysis (3 years analysand) and having 10+ years of speaking English (I am foreign), I find Phillips’ language kinda hard to get at first, in both ways, but I did find some great insights.
Now, being serious, I believe psychoanalysts or people (like me) interested in the topic will take more advantage of this book. This is my first Phillips’ book, although I know the author for other titles. Also, Being new to analysis (3 years analysand) and having 10+ years of speaking English (I am foreign), I find Phillips’ language kinda hard to get at first, in both ways, but I did find some great insights.
April 19, 2026
Highly generative material and a brilliant read for those with an interest in psychoanalysis. It's a sort of synthesis and juxtaposition of Freud and Rorty (one might say a slightly pessimistic and European brand of determinism against an overly optimistic and somewhat capitalistic brand of American pragmatism). Rorty as a cure for an overly deterministic kind of analysis. Something thrilling that opens possibility through experimentation, the only question that matters being "does this get me the life I want." But how do we know the life we want?
June 5, 2026
I liked how the book gives the reader an insight into why humans operate the way they do in most aspects of life. Furthermore, I agree with the fact that we are all fighting against “the resistance” meaning that we try and limit our desires to live in a normal society when really it’s best to fully express ourselves and not be ashamed. Only negative in the book is that the author took a circuitous way to make all his points .
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 20, 2026
Generally an enjoyable read, but I sense my enjoyment is rather untangleable from my general liking of psychoanalytic thinking, and wanting to be immersed in it and to continue to learn it. But you really only learn it once. That's one of Phillips' main takeaways, especially well-realized in the last essay. The last essay is particularly good. He needs an editor.
July 5, 2026
Very little about life and all about psychoanalysis which I previously had little interest in. But thanks to this I have learned something about it. Ancient Greeks and Romans will teach you more about what is the life you want and how to achieve it through virtue. Psychoanalysis on the other hand is a tool to manage human resources to keep them operational.
April 3, 2026
Als Phillips-fan toch een tikje teleurgesteld om de dubbelingen, de overmatige vergelijkingen tussen Freud en Rorty, en de soms onduidelijke redenen voor de onderwerpen. Wel erg enthousiast over de delen waarin Winnicott en Ferenczi worden behandeld en over het hoofdstuk Resistance.
April 13, 2026
This might very well be the best book I have read in my entire life.
May 12, 2026
‘the wish to be taught as a fundamental defence or deference, a potential refuge from the experiencing of something about oneself’
Read
May 13, 2026mixed bag
July 1, 2026
Super dense sometimes especially the first half of the book reads like a textbook. Base on the study of psychoanalytics, lots of in depth theories and you can tell the author is very knowledgeable in this field. Explanations of how childhood experiences shape adulthood and how having certain mindset shifts will help you achieve the life you want to live.
Rate: 4.75 stars
Physical copy
Rate: 4.75 stars
Physical copy
April 8, 2026
It was okay.
June 18, 2026
It was actually really nice to read about psychoanalysis and pragmatism in a way that made it clear and made sense, though his sentences are really frustrating but overall gets the point across. However, i was misguided: i picked it up because i thought it would help me understand the life i want and how to get that (the title) and actually it did not do that at all. Would i recommend this book? Only if someone is interested in understanding complex ideas clearly but it did not change my life.
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