Changing our Approach to Change with Adam Phillips

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.

[@elessar0009]

Magnificent conversation. Thank you very much. Really enjoyed that.

[@kirstinstrand6292]

And for some was a combination of James and Freud, once religion fails us.
This is an intriguing discussion, I must say!

[@1965simonfellows]

David Smail (spelling)....
Thanks

[@susanluraschi1400]

"Biological unfolding"....
The Banshees of Inisherin is a wonderful example of two forces: wanting to change (I don't want to see this person anymore) and I want everything to remain as it was....Guess who wins?

[@K.psy.]

Цікавий психоаналітичний погляд

[@bertiemarshall3391]

Interviewer is very annoying…grinning like fool…

[@saintjerome23]

fools are beautiful

[@theeskatelife]

wow what a projection!!!! why would that bother you? that never even occurred to me as being something annoying