On Getting Better [Paperback]

On Getting Betteris a thoughtful and compact book about self-improvement from Britains leading psychoanalyst, author ofMissing OutandOn Kindness.

To talk about getting betterabout wanting to change in ways that we might choose and preferis 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 toOn Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips explores how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better.

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