The Life You Want, begins by positing an argument or perhaps just a difference between the life we integrate within the Freudian model, that is, a life shaped by instincts and our childhood within a family, and the postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty's life idea, which is a positing of the many lives we can invent, experiment with as we move through time.
The Life You Want (in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi)
Adam Phillips has written some 30 books now and most of them are made up of essays. They're epigrammatic, enlivening, and they use and tease out a genre developed or invented perhaps by Montaigne and made a little more comical by Charles Lamb.
Psychoanalyst and writer
10 Mar 2026
Key Points
- The Life You Want, begins by positing an argument or perhaps just a difference between the life we integrate within the Freudian model, that is, a life shaped by instincts and our childhood within a family, and the postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty's life idea, which is a positing of the many lives we can invent, experiment with as we move through time.
- Freud is very explicit and clear about how determined our lives are by the past, and also by our instinctual life and by our traumatic experiences. Rorty comes along building really on William James's work and is incredibly, fantastically optimistic in what his critics would say, an American way, anything is possible.
- . Freud says to Rorty, actually wanting and making something of yourself is much more difficult than you think. You're underestimating what we're up against. Rorty says to Freud: you'll just pretend to be omniscient. You don't know what reality is or people are. You're
The life you want
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