On April 11, Phillips joins psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster for an evening of conversation that is as much a provocation as it is a discussion — about desire, fantasy, and the lives we actually want to be living. Adam will begin by leading us through Masud Khan’s essay “On Lying Fallow” to be followed by a discussion on Escapism. The conversation will be moderated by Ben Kafka.
Tickets are $100 and include a copy of The Life You Want. Light bites, wine, and beer will be served.
What is it that we cannot bear, and what do we imagine lies elsewhere?
In his new book, The Life You Want, Adam Phillips — one of our most essential and provocative thinkers on the human condition — turns to the figure of the escape artist. Not to condemn escape, but to ask a more unsettling question: what are we trying to get away from, and what are we hoping to find instead? If life is something one escapes, what kind of life is one escaping into?
At a moment of mounting moral panic about children disappearing into their phones and adults retreating into distraction, the conversation usually begins and ends with condemnation. Phillips proposes a different provocation: the problem may not be escape itself, but our impoverished imagination about what makes life worth staying for. Rather than asking how to stop escape, perhaps we need to ask what forms of presence we are offering one another.
Adam Phillips, formerly a 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 numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including Missing Out, Unforbidden Pleasures, In Writing, Attention Seeking, On Wanting to Change, On Getting Better, and On Giving Up. He is also the general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York and teaches at The New School for Social Research. She is the author, most recently, of Disorganisation and Sex (Divided, 2022) and On Breathing (Catapult, 2025). She is a regular contributor to The New York Times, The New York Times Review of Books, and The Paris Review, and has a column with Cultured Magazine. She is on the board of the Foundation for Community Psychoanalysis and the Pulsion Institute.
The banner image (and Phillips' book cover art) is Joachim Patinir’s "Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx". The painting can be seen in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain.