The renowned psychoanalyst returns to How To Academy to delve into the deeply human impulse to improve ourselves, asking why we feel it, how it works and what it means.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change – to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy.

We change all the time – growing older and older – and how we think about change changes over time too.

We want to think of our lives as progress myths – as narratives of positive personal growth – at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks.

So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make – and they don’t always go, or come, together . . .

This event is about that fact.

The leading voice in literary psychoanalysis, with fans including Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Deborah Levy, Adam Phillips joins us for a unique conversation with Reverend Giles Fraser exploring the fertile terrain of the human condition with the wisdom and insight which have made him one of the foremost public intellectuals of our time.