The Life You Want: Adam Phillips in Conversation with Katherine Angel

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips visits Foyles for a discussion about The Life You Want, his lucid and probing new work with Katherine Angel.

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. Personal and political, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment and wanting.

Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising 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 most recently On Giving Up, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Katherine Angel is the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell, and Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again. Her next book, Poor Freud, is forthcoming with Verso and Norton USA. She lives in London.

The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Your ticket includes a complimentary glass of wine.

Image Credit: Judith Clark