The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
ADAM PHILLIPSThere is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
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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.
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Transgression is a quest for solitude
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We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.
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I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
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Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
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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 ,
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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.
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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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You write to find out what you believe.
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
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There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden.
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Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
ADAM PHILLIPS