Mature ... Phillips’s anti-authoritarian tendencies motivate him to rescue the idea of resistance ... Itself a sort of dream work, which synthesizes opposing elements into a poetic, if wishful, whole.
To its credit—and, sometimes, to its detriment—The Life You Want is anything but a self-help book. It’s a dense and at times frustratingly narrow collection of academic essays about the problem of what we want—and how to know what we want—using both psychoanalysis and the philosophy of pragmatism to scaffold Mr. Phillips’s account ... Mr. Phillips’s prose borders on the excessively academic, but he writes lucidly about his areas of expertise. He is at his most compelling when introducing us to lesser-known figures in the history of psychoanalysis ... Suffers from Mr. Phillips’s conservative approach. Not bombastic enough to call for a total reappraisal of how we think about desire, the book is hampered by the dictates of its author’s academic field.
Written for a reader who is on a first name basis with psychoanalysis, but who still doesn’t quite understand what psychoanalysis is supposed to do ... The book is, at times, unnecessarily dense, but it remains legible for a reader who has never studied philosophy or psychology in any detailed way ... The book’s strength lies in posing these questions carefully without providing pat answers. I say this without disparagement but as a warning to impatient readers: Phillips is, as always, a master of the 'maybe.'
Concise, erudite, but frequently dense ... Though it's likely to be a challenging undertaking, anyone interested in taking a deep dive into theories of the unconscious and its impact on how we live our lives will find it intriguing and may be inspired to go further in their own investigation.
