A conversation between Adam Phillips and Alice McCrum at the American Library in Paris. Filmed on 26/04/2023 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom.
Celebrated psychoanalyst Adam Phillips discusses changing our understanding of change and getting better at talking about getting better.
Can people truly change? When one is unhappy or unwell, is it possible to get better? Adam Phillips, the UK’s foremost literary psychoanalyst, thinks that these may not be the right questions to ask. Rather, we should consider what we mean by the terms ‘change’ and ‘get better’, and how transformation and self-betterment have been mythologized. In bestselling works On Wanting to Change and On Getting Better, Phillips encourages us to rethink the ways we talk about mental health and the lives we lead. By redefining the terms of the conversation surrounding change, we may learn to think more clearly about ourselves. At the Library, Phillips discussed the human mind and the tools we have to understand it.
About the speaker:
Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practicing psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of various works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently The Cure For Psychoanalysis, On Getting Better, On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, and In Writing. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature, and a contributor to the London Review of Books.
Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.