The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it… — Adam Phillips Copy Share Image
“Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred. — Adam Phillips Copy Share
“Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
“If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.” — Adam Phillips Copy Share
“Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness -- meaning recognize it… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
“So there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .. Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..The child [uses] ‘doubt about… — Adam Phillips Copy Share
There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage — Adam Phillips Copy Share
There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs — Adam Phillips Copy Share
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. — Adam Phillips Copy Share
