Book Review: On Wanting to Change

I read these two books quickly. I was excited for various reasons, including some as simple as their colourful covers, and how they felt, literally, accessible. Adam Phillips was an author I did not know, more of which later, and I had not read much therapy-related content for a while. I felt the excitement and a keenness, yet when it came to writing this review, it was difficult. Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult. Not hard conceptually, not challenging in terms of knowing where I would end up in terms of a recommendation, simply difficult to sit down and do the writing.

Format-wise, they are simple, little books. On Wanting to Change has a preface, a post-realisation of COVID Coda and four chapters in between entitled 'Conversion hysteria'; 'Surprise changes'; 'Converting politics'; and 'Believe it or not'. On Getting Better has a similar preface but no Coda, and chapters on 'Cure'; 'Unsatisfying pleasures'; 'Truth'; 'On not having experiences'; and 'Loose change'. Phillips uses religious examples and language throughout, something I struggled with as the Bible is not a favourite of mine, however it is a useful point of reference for conversion and change. It was clear from the author blurb that Phillips is a big name. I felt flooded with shame, not for the first time, that I did not know him. What kind of therapist does not know him when he is the general editor of Freud? Then I took a step back. I read broadly. I read quite a lot, including a reasonable share of work-related books, and made a decent fist at reading many of the suggested readings during my training at an existential/integrative institute. The literature around psychotherapy is huge and my time to read is limited by such things as sleep, work, childcare and fun. Philips speaks to me about this very issue in the final pages of On Wanting to Change in his Coda written, unlike the rest of the book, in a world plagued by COVID.

It may be that when catastrophic change is inflicted upon us, with all the suffering that entails, we may become more able and willing to consider and discuss what kind of change we would like, the kind of change that we realise we need in order to get the lives we want. But to do that we must resist the temptation to get back to normal, now that we can see more clearly what normality has involved us in. And indeed, who decides what we take normal to be (OWTC: 140-141).

Phillips cites Socrates around the idea of wanting to be a converter or be converted when he writes "everyone is in pursuit of the good, but no one can agree about what the good is" (OWTC: 113), something highlighted in the clash between health considerations and restrictions on the one hand

Existential Analysis: Journal of The Society for Existential Analysis
198