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Anyone familiar with Adam Phillips is well acquainted with what has been aptly termed his “ouroboric style” of writing—self-reflective sentences that lead us into the mouth of a question and drop us out the other side, only to find ourselves back in the mouth again, transformed by having traversed its body. Looping is central to Phillips's writing. It's also his psychoanalytic method—following associations, playing with language, allowing for surprise, letting material reveal itself through repetition and return. He's long been circling the same fundamental questions: What does it mean to want? To change? To find satisfaction? To resist it? In The Life You Want, he returns to this familiar territory, even occasionally repeating himself verbatim from his many prior books.
Yet we know from Freud that repetition is how the symptom speaks, by duplicating itself. Phillips keeps returning to these fundamental questions about wanting, satisfaction, resistance, circling the cavernous center the ouroboros loops around—impossible to locate and impossible to leave alone. This is his symptom, his pleasure, his favorite place to be.
He's an auteur in this way. Reading The Life You Want is like watching an artist return to a single motif over a lifetime—each variation deepening the mystery rather than resolving it. You know you're in a Phillips text by its unmistakable signature: the looping cadence, the preoccupations that refuse to conclude. His repetitions enact the very thing psychoanalysis teaches us—that the symptom is not only our affliction but our pleasure. If at times his style grows wearying, it remains alluring. It may be a matter of preference, but I find myself still wanting more of him.
The Life You Want carries a spirit of encouragement. Phillips, who is characteristically resistant to prescription, offers something approaching actual advice early in the text: “And what is to be
done is to discuss the lives we think we want; and in so far as we are able … to try th