From the UK’s foremost literary psychoanalyst, a dazzling new book on the universal urge to change our lives.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change—to become our best selves through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time—growing older and older—and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths—as narratives of positive personal growth—at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.

Adam Phillips’s sparkling book On Wanting to Change explores the stories we tell about change, and the changes we actually make—and the fact that they don’t always go, or come, together.