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On Getting Better

Adam Phillips

Picador

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ISBN10: 1250838878
ISBN13: 9781250838872

Trade Paperback

176 Pages

$16.00

CA$22.00

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To talk about getting better—about wanting to change in ways that we might choose and prefer—is to talk about pursuing the life we want, in the full knowledge that our pictures of the life we want, of our version of a good life, come from what we have already experienced. (We write the sentences we write because of the sentences we have read.)

How can we talk differently about how we might want to change, knowing that all change precipitates us into an uncertain future? In this companion book to On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

BOOK EXCERPTS

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About the author

Adam Phillips

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, In Writing, and Unforbidden Pleasures. A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, he is the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Jerry Bauer