“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,” the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want — that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by “this sadness of never understanding ourselves,” it is hard to know who we are. To want anything is to acknowledge a lack, a gap between the real and the ideal, between the life we have and the life we desire, which is fundamentally a gap between who we are and who we wish to be.

Pulsating beneath our lives is the most hautning, most universal question: “Why are we not better than we are?”

In our yearning for an answer, for a bridge between the real self and the ideal self, we have invented religion and psychotherapy, we have turned to shamans and self-help gurus, we have fasted and prayed, filled out personality tests and followed autosuggestion protocols. But while a certain level of restlessness is necessary to our creative vitality — that “divine dissatisfaction” out of which art is born — living with a sense of perpetual deficiency petrifies the possible in us. For, as Kurt Vonnegut knew, there is no greater enemy to happiness than the sense of not enough, the feeling that we need to have more or be more in order to live with a fullness of being and an inner completeness.

British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better (public library).

We are trapped, he observes, by our frame of reference:

If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear… Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.

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Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one’s personal vision.

He considers the paradox at the crux of our zeal for self-improvement:

We can’t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don’t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be — our better life, our better selves — lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.

The problem with an idealized future is that every ideal is not only a form of wanting but a form of presumed knowledge — about what is optimal and desirable, about the vector of change — and yet the future is fundamentally unknowable. (This is why the things we most ardently desire are the most transformative, but we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation.) Phillips writes:

One cannot know the consequences of one’s wanting, because one can’t know the future except as an assumed replication of the past… It is almost certain that we won’t or can’t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want.

With an eye to a word so fashionable that we have hollowed it of meaning by overuse and mususe, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us — trauma — he adds:

There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn’t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience.

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Learning from experience means learning what your experience can’t teach you — the nature and quality of future experience.

Those soul-broadening, life-deepening risks, those blessed unknowns of the future fometing the capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying, are precisely what Mario Benedetti placed at the center of his stunning poem “Do Not Spare Yourself.”

Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott — whose intellectual lineage Phillips continues — on the qualities of a healthy mind, then revisit Phillips on the paradoxes of transformation and the countercultural courage of changing your mind.