The child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPSThe child..will try to make himself..independent of other people. .
ADAM PHILLIPSPeople change, but there really are limits.
ADAM PHILLIPSwe are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see.
ADAM PHILLIPSEverybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.
ADAM PHILLIPSI am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to?
ADAM PHILLIPSTragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.
ADAM PHILLIPSLovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.
ADAM PHILLIPSYou write to find out what you believe.
ADAM PHILLIPSThe 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.
ADAM PHILLIPSTransgression is a quest for solitude
ADAM PHILLIPSWanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.
ADAM PHILLIPSWe 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 ,
ADAM PHILLIPSOne thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life.
ADAM PHILLIPSTo grow up is to discover what one is unequal to.
ADAM PHILLIPSIt 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.
ADAM PHILLIPSBelieving in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.
ADAM PHILLIPS