Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access
More Adam Phillips Quotes
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The past influences everything and dictates nothing.
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we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
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Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition.
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There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage
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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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One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
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We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.
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Transgression is a quest for solitude
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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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The child [uses] ‘doubt about food to hide doubt about love.’
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Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
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Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
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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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To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable.
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To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
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