The Life You Want (Adam Phillips 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.

Lisa Appignanesi

Writer and Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities

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Lisa Appignanesi

Writer and Visiting Professor in Medical Humanities

04 May 2026

Citation-ready summary

Author: Lisa Appignanesi

Last updated: 04 May 2026

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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

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. Through a series of interlinked essays, Phillips explores the difficulties we have around the whole idea of enjoying – and fashioning – our lives in cultures that insistently promote enjoyment while making it very difficult for so many people. Exploring the personal and political overlap in the issue of our lives, The Life You Want is a profound examination of our ambivalence about enjoyment, and indeed, wanting. ©Penguin