The Life You Want
Farrar Straus & Giroux · Hardcover · March 31, 2026
Adam Phillips, the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time, plays with ideas about the lives we want.
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- Who it’s for
- Interlinked essays examine how we imagine, pursue, and struggle with lives we want to enjoy.
- Themes
- Wanting and ambivalence, Enjoyment and its difficulties, Personal and political life
- Genres
- Philosophy Writing, Psychoanalysis, The Pursuit of Happiness
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Start with this bookAbout this book
Adam Phillips, the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time, plays with ideas about the lives we want. Where do we get ideas about the lives we want? And, what do we do—and fail to do—about actually getting them? In The Life You Want, 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.
Continue reading
Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying—and fashioning—our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting.
Wanting and Enjoyment
Interlinked essays examine how we imagine, pursue, and struggle with lives we want to enjoy.
Come here for
- Psychoanalytic and literary approaches to wanting
- The personal and political dimensions of enjoyment
Expect
- Reflections on the difficulty of fashioning an enjoyable life
- An examination of ambivalence about wanting
Where it sits
| Psychoanalysis | 78% |
|---|---|
| Philosophy Writing | 46% |
| The Pursuit of Happiness | 26% |
Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.
Publisher categories
- Social Psychology
- Existential Approaches
- Personal Growth
- Authors
- Adam Phillips
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- March 31, 2026
- Format
- Hardcover
- Theme
- Wanting and ambivalence · Enjoyment and its difficulties · Personal and political life
- Reading lane
- Social Psychology