When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe
ADAM PHILLIPSOne thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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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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Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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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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I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
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Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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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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Excesses of appetite are self-cures for feelings of hopelessness. ..
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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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The vocabulary of one’s self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd.
ADAM PHILLIPS