Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips
brothers global leaders nations raise sisters together united voices
United Nations is an organization of global neighbors. I really wanted to be here to raise our voices together to our leaders to do more for our brothers and sisters who are poor.
blind-spots limits recognition
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.
lovers wonder analysts
Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
children long people
People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.
children mad feelings
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.
children independent self
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 food to hide doubt about love.’
children might obstacles
The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
happy-marriage possibility scandalous
There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
growing-up grows
To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
assessment problem being-true
I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?