By Adam Phillips
Reflections on self-improvement and change
Subject
Themes
Self-improvement dominates contemporary culture. The aspiration to become better versions of ourselves drives personal goals, therapeutic interventions, and everyday decisions. Yet this relentless pursuit of betterment contains paradoxes and pitfalls that merit closer examination. What happens when the desire to change overshadows acceptance of who we are? When does improvement become an obstacle rather than a pathway to fulfilment?
Self-improvement dominates contemporary culture. The aspiration to become better versions of ourselves drives personal goals, therapeutic interventions, and everyday decisions. Yet this relentless pursuit of betterment contains paradoxes and pitfalls that merit closer examination. What happens when…
Adam Phillips's On Getting Better arrives at a moment when self-improvement discourse saturates contemporary culture. Wellness industries boom, productivity gurus proliferate, optimisation becomes imperative. Against this backdrop, Phillips's scepticism about cure and improvement narratives proves…
Getting better always begins in imagination. Before any actual change occurs, private fantasies construct idealised futures where better selves inhabit better lives. This mental rehearsal represents the everyday utopianism that animates desire, shaping how we formulate wishes and picture potential.…
Nature aims at nothing. This stark observation challenges centuries of teleological thinking about human development and progress. Unlike anything else in the natural world, humans create their own purposes and devise their own standards for excelling at those purposes. As self-interpreting animals…
What does it mean to be cured? The question sounds simple but opens onto paradoxes that structure therapeutic culture. Cure implies arrival at a destination, the end of symptoms, restoration to prior wholeness. Yet psychoanalysis and related practices resist this medical model whilst simultaneously…
Pleasure presents a puzzle. We pursue what promises satisfaction yet often find the achievement hollow. Conversely, we sometimes discover satisfaction in precisely what we thought we wanted to avoid. This mismatch between anticipated and actual pleasure reveals something crucial about desire,…
Truth holds privileged status in contemporary culture. We valorise authenticity, demand transparency, insist on facing reality. Therapy promises to uncover hidden truths; self-help literature urges brutal honesty; relationships require vulnerability and disclosure. Yet this truth-worship may itself…
Personal life without self-improvement seems unimaginable. Whether called ambition, aspiration, or desire, the orientation toward betterment structures existence. This future-directed consciousness suggests that what could be matters more than what is, that hope itself is the primary object of…
Psychoanalysts shirk using the concept of cure in written work. This evasion reflects profound discomfort with making therapeutic promises in commodity culture. The patient wants relief from suffering whilst the analyst offers a valued treatment. Yet writing about cure involves controversial…
Pleasure and satisfaction seem inseparable, yet Freud identifies their troubling mismatch. We can be wrong about our pleasures, wrong about what they are and whether they satisfy. Knowledge claims about pleasure prove particularly prone to error. We want wishes to be prophetic whilst knowing wishing…
In seventeenth-century England's aftermath, Commonwealth principles emerged against divine right of kings. Algernon Sidney warned how avarice fills hearts with rage. Destructive villainies proceed from it. Solomon advised beware of those hastening to grow rich, saying they shall not be innocent.…
Lacan wrote that we only know what it is to be alive because a body is something that enjoys itself. Bodily enjoyment is the key according to Lacan, who was not the first to see enjoyment as essential. Freud insisted in Civilization and Its Discontents that happiness is essentially subjective. We…
Freud takes flight into quantifications of science regarding pleasure. Pleasure and unpleasure concern quantity of excitation, bound or unbound, in the mind. How much excitement exists, and in what can it be contained? Bodily functions, cultural forms, theories about sexuality, language all serve as…
The question of how experiences are had or not had connects to broader questions about attention, presence, and transformation. When we talk about not having experiences, we address the peculiar quality of consciousness that makes it impossible to be fully present to our own changing. This is not…
The quest for satisfying pleasures may require finding satisfying descriptions of both pleasure and satisfaction themselves. Descriptions that do not assume sovereignty they could never have. There is no shortage of people telling us in no uncertain terms what our pleasure means, what it is in…
By Adam Phillips
Subject
Themes
Self-improvement dominates contemporary culture. The aspiration to become better versions of ourselves drives personal goals, therapeutic interventions, and everyday decisions. Yet this relentless pursuit of betterment contains paradoxes and pitfalls that merit closer examination. What happens when the desire to change overshadows acceptance of who we are? When does improvement become an obstacle rather than a pathway to fulfilment?