"Phillips is a figure for our therapy-soaked era, even if, for him, therapy feeds into and enables life, whereas we often seem to view life as feeding into and enabling therapy . [His] contrarianism, a commitment to reversing whatever expectation the reader might be imagined to hold, in an attempt to disarm and deprogram, possibly even cure her . The Life You Want is itself a sort of dream work, which synthesizes opposing elements into a poetic, if wishful, whole." --Katy Waldman, The New Yorker "Phillips wants to offer [us] something else: 'enlivening incoherences' and 'unheard-of-open-endedness.' Thus at the center of The Life You Want is a deceptively simple claim: life is wanting. Wanting is not redemptive, not a guarantee, not even really a problem. On the contrary, wanting is an ideal of exposure. It keeps life unfinished.

For Phillips, wanting is less a puzzle to be solved than a condition to be protected." --Jamieson Webster, Cultured " If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it's Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city's artists and writersand a cultural figure in his own rightbest known for books with titles that sound suspiciously enjoyable for someone paid to dissect the psyche: Going Sane , On Giving Up , On Kissing , Tickling , and Being Bored . His latest, The Life You Want , offers no five-step plan to happiness. Instead, it asks the irritatingly good question: Why are you so desperate for a better life in the first place? " --Hermione Lee, Interview "[Reading The Life You Want ] is like having a deep chat with your brainiest friend . The title may sound like classic January self-help, but let's be clear: Phillips is not actually going to teach you how to get the Life You Want. Rather than giving us a list of improving life hacks he sets off interesting trains of thought about what a good life might look like, and leaves us to do with them what we will . Writing like this opens things up, broadens life out --it is the antidote to scrolling through endless January wellbeing advice.

Go on, I dare you: pick it up and take your brain for a spin." --Alice O'Keeffe, The Times (London) "Phillips offers a subtle but devastating critique of the notion that we 21st-century decadents can be fulfilled by things." --Stuart Jeffries, The Telegraph "A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life." --Kirkus Reviews.