Adam Phillips, formerly a principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

"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

"If psychoanalysis has a rock star, it's Adam Phillips. The London-based shrink is the quiet confessor to the city's artists and writers―and a cultural figure in his own right―best 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."
--The Times (London)

"A sophisticated, mind-stretching argument for psychoanalysis as a way of understanding why we want a good life."
--Kirkus Reviews

Publisher: Picador USA

Pub date: 2027-03-30

Length: 160 pages