The Life You Want

by Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips, the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time, plays with ideas about 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, Psychology, British Literature

Audible Audio

Published March 31, 2026

About the author

Adam 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."

Reviews

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

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

[Lisa]

Definitely 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.

[Jordana Moser · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Jaime Aguilera · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Gaetano Venezia · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 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)

[Tyler Golato · Rating 4 out of 5]

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?

[Alex Hulst · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Francesco Salamone · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might very well be the best book I have read in my entire life.

[John Bleasdale · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was okay.