The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access — 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“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 Image
“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.” — Adam Phillips Copy Share Image
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
