“Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as… — Adam Phillips All-joy-and-no-fun 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 Criticism Copy Share Image
The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. — Adam Phillips Aesthetics 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… — Adam Phillips Communication 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… — Adam Phillips Good thing Copy Share Image
“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.” — Adam Phillips Anger 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… — 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… — Adam Phillips Blind 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… — Adam Phillips Ambition 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]… — Adam Phillips Appetite Copy Share Image
There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage — Adam Phillips Happiness Copy Share Image
There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs — Adam Phillips Belief Copy Share Image
Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. — Adam Phillips Bears Copy Share Image
I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to? — Adam Phillips Assessment Copy Share Image
“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.” — Adam Phillips Copy Share Image
People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change… — Adam Phillips About yourself Copy Share Image
Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders. — Adam Phillips Analysts 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… — Adam Phillips Adults Copy Share Image
“The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too… — Adam Phillips Failure Copy Share Image
The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access — Adam Phillips Access Copy Share Image
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical. — Adam Phillips Ends Copy Share Image
The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our… — Adam Phillips Adults Copy Share Image
