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.
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.
