Phillips, Adam – The Bell Bookshop

The Life You Want

Emma — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

‘The best living essayist writing in English’ John Gray

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 difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental. And, necessarily, we all must make things up as we go along.

What is to be done? The answer, Adam Phillips suggests, is to pay especially close attention to what interests us, excites us and frightens us; to make an experiment of living; and thereby to discover the life we want – and whether it is viable.

‘One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time’ John Banville

On giving up

Emma — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘A wise, generous book’ Washington Post

From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.

To give up or not to give up?

The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.

Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.

There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment – an attempt to make a different future.

In On Giving Up, acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up, and helps us to address the central question: what must we give up in order to feel more alive?

‘One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time’ John Banville

‘The best living essayist writing in English’ John Gray

On Getting Better

Emma — Thu, 11 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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 or come out of 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.