Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.
Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.
Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.
Adapted from Wikipedia.
Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."
“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”
“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.”
“The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.”
“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.”
“Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.”
“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.”
“There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage”
“Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.”
“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?”