The Life You Want

About the book

'Every mind-blowing book from Adam Phillips suspends all the certainties we are most attached to and somehow makes this feel exhilarating' Deborah Levy
What does it mean to 'get a life' in a culture in which there is so much to want?
And why do the lives we think we need so often fail to satisfy?
With his characteristic curiosity, warmth and perceptiveness, Adam Phillips addresses one of the key perplexities of modern life, which is that we are all the products of the families or social groups we grow up in: they shape us selectively and guide us to their preferred ways of living; but we then spend our lives haunted by the aspects of ourselves that they have ignored.
We conform and yet we rebel. So, the lives we want for ourselves are likely to be a...