Can Psychoanalysis Help You Get the Life You Want?

Illustration by Kevin Lucbert

Katy Waldman | The New Yorker

In a new book, Adam Phillips wages a playful war on the strictures of traditional talk therapy.

“The Life You Want” finds Phillips chafing at his field’s prescriptiveness and dismayed by our inclination to submit to other people’s preëmptive conclusions about our desires.