― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness
“The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.”
― Adam Phillips, Monogamy
“The past influences everything and dictates nothing.”
― Adam Phillips, Darwin's Worms On Life Stories And Death Stories
“Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance
“To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.”
― Adam Phillips, Equals
“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 demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.”
― Adam Phillips
“Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”
― Adam Phillips
“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance
“There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage”
― Adam Phillips
“The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.
Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?
Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined
“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 as yours -- then one can take some fear out of the world.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
“Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance
“So there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it is the point and not the problem; in which the project is to learn how not to ride the bicycle, how not to understand the poem. Or to put it the other way round, this would be a life in which getting it – the will to get it, the ambition to get it – was the problem; in which wanting to be an accomplice didn’t take precedence over making up one’s mind.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites
“Kindness—that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself—has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality).”
― Adam Phillips, On Kindness
“It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored - the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
“In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
“Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods--to our most passionate selves-- our lives can being to feel futile”
― Adam Phillips
“Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century.”
― Adam Phillips, Becoming Freud
