“If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful… — Adam Phillips Copy Share Image
We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults , to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never… — 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