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Apr 09, 2026
Adam Phillips, the foremost psychoanalytic writer of our time, joins renowned psychoanalyst and critic Jamieson Webster for a conversation about necessity, desire, and reimagining our lives — and Phillips’ new book, The Life You Want.
What do we really want from our lives — and what gets in the way? In The Life You Want, the beloved psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips turns his attention to that deceptively simple question with curiosity, wit, and intellectual imagination. Phillips has long been a rare figure: a thinker who writes about desire, ambition, boredom, freedom, and frustration in ways that feel less like instruction and more like permission — to think differently, to be kinder to ourselves, to stay curious about our own contradictions. In The Life You Want, he asks what it might mean to stop chasing the lives we think we’re supposed to want, and instead pay closer attention to the lives we’re actually living.
Whether you’re deeply interested in psychoanalysis or simply curious about how to live with honesty and imagination, join Phillips and Webster as they explore the personal and political dimensions of want, need, and pleasure — and how they can determine the course of our lives.
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