What am I reading about when reading Adam Phillips? What am I learning or getting out of it? Phillips’s style can prompt such doubt – doubt reminiscent of anxiety about the efficacy of psychoanalytic treatment, about whether it can help you, change you, make you feel better. This suggests one is drawn to his work by the promise of a form of wisdom that can help you live, of some relief through enlightenment. So you could say that one reads Phillips with the kind of expectation that his latest book is about, but will naturally not directly satisfy: a book of his titled On Getting Better will not tell you how to get better. Rather, this slight collection, a sequel to On Wanting to Change, which appeared earlier this year, “is about how we might get better at talking about what it is to get better”.
Phillips is a practising psychoanalyst; as a writer he is best described as an essayist – many of his books are, like this recent pair, collections of lectures, essays and reviews, and even his stand-alone books tend to be slim enough to qualify as extended essays. His themes – boredom, pleasure, worrying, missing out, self-criticism – are usually beguilingly ordinary, Phillips’s enticing conduits to the major psychoanalytic subjects: the superego, the unconscious, desire, and so on.
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