On Getting Better
A psychoanalyst asks whether the modern demand to improve yourself has quietly become a way of declining to live at all.
Phillips asks what we actually mean when we speak of getting better, and whether the demand for self-improvement has become a way of refusing to live. Short, aphoristic, and characteristically unwilling to supply the reassurance that the subject seems to invite from every other book about it.
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Maria Popova
British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better (public library).
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