The Observer Book Club with Adam Phillips

Invited experts

AO

Alex O’Connell

Adam Phillips

Author

AO

Alex O’Connell

Adam Phillips

Author

What if, instead of asking how to change your life, you began by asking what it really means to want it? In a culture that never stops urging us towards more - more success, more love, more experience - how do we tell the difference between the life we feel we should want, and the one we might actually enjoy?

Join us for a thoughtful and searching Observer Book Club with Adam Phillips, one of Britain’s most original and influential psychoanalytic writers, as he discusses his provocative new book, The Life You Want.

Renowned for his ability to reveal the hidden logic of our inner lives, Phillips turns his attention to one of the most enduring and uncomfortable questions we face: what does it really mean to want the life we say we want? Blending psychoanalysis, philosophy and literature with his trademark clarity and wit, The Life You Want explores the desires that shape us, the fantasies we live by, and the quiet compromises that structure a life. In the Observer newsroom, in conversation with opinion and ideas editor Alex O'Connell, Phillips will examine how our early attachments, ambitions and disappointments inform the versions of ourselves we become - and how deeply our ideas of fulfilment are shaped by culture, expectation and chance.

Warm, provocative and quietly radical, The Life You Want offers a rare opportunity to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about happiness, success and the self. Together, we’ll ask: What does it mean to live a life you actually want? How much of our wanting is truly our own? And in an age of constant comparison, how might we learn to want differently - and better?