Adam Phillips Quotes & Sayings

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them. — Adam Phillips

I am always true to myself, that is the problem. Who else could I be true to? — Adam Phillips

There is nothing more terrorizing than the possibility that nothing is hidden. There is nothing more scandalous than a happy marriage — Adam Phillips

We need, in other words, to know something about what we don't get, and about the importance of not getting it. — Adam Phillips

Loneliness is the inevitable cost of looking after ourselves. — Adam Phillips

Greed is a way of avoiding making choices: if I have everything I don't have to choose what I want. And choosing what I want means giving up some pleasures for other pleasures. — Adam Phillips

There is always a ..belief that by destroying the thing that we love we destroy our needs — Adam Phillips

We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use. — Adam Phillips

Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness
meaning recognize it as yours
then one can take some fear out of the world. — Adam Phillips

Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism. — Adam Phillips

(The French psychoanalyst Lacan suggested that the Christian injunction 'love thy neighbour as thyself' must be ironic because people hate themselves.) — Adam Phillips

Indeed that is what our lives are, a project of recovery and restitution; or we have to ironize our always wanting to get something back that we never had and that never existed anyway — Adam Phillips

It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn't know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing - nothing comes of nothing - but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. — Adam Phillips

Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter. — Adam Phillips

We don't have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be. — Adam Phillips

If you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things our most violent form of nostalgia. — Adam Phillips

Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood. — Adam Phillips

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. — Adam Phillips

Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century. — Adam Phillips

We can only be really realistic after we have tried our optimism out. — Adam Phillips

The past influences everything and dictates nothing. — Adam Phillips

The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.
Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?
Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration? — Adam Phillips

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. — Adam Phillips

Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start. — Adam Phillips

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy. — Adam Phillips

And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us. — Adam Phillips

Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by. — Adam Phillips

The pleasure of kindness is that it connects us with others; but the terror of kindness is that it makes us too immediately aware of our own and other people's vulnerabilities (vulnerabilities that we are prone to call failings when we are at our most frightened). Vulnerability - particularly the vulnerability we call desire - is our shared biological inheritance. Kindness, in other words, opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread. How can people, from childhood onward, feel confident enough to take such risks? — Adam Phillips

Two's company, three's a couple. — Adam Phillips

It is the link between satisfaction and redress
the idea that a satisfaction scene, whatever else it is, is a revenge tragedy
that I want to pursue; and the sense that we waylay our desire
make it literally unreal
with pictures of its satisfaction. Pornography, for example, can easily be used, among many other things, to pre-empt the elaboration of erotic fantasy; it can be, in Masud Kahn's words, 'the stealer of dreams'. To put it in old-fashioned Freudian language, fantasies of satisfaction are defences against desiring, the attempt in fantasy to take the risk out of desire; or to put it in more Kleinian language, fantasies of satisfaction are attacks upon desire; they are, in fact, against desiring, both up against it and in opposition to it. Our fantasies of satisfaction are clues to our fears about desiring. Wishful fantasies are the original sins of omission. — Adam Phillips

Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring — Adam Phillips

as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by. — Adam Phillips

A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, 'What would you do if you were cured?' The man answered him, and Adler said, 'Well, go and do it then.' That was the treatment. — Adam Phillips

Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods
to our most passionate selves
our lives can being to feel futile — Adam Phillips

However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence. — Adam Phillips

Transgression is a quest for solitude — Adam Phillips

You write to find out what you believe. — Adam Phillips

So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works. — Adam Phillips

psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What — Adam Phillips

Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). — Adam Phillips

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias. — Adam Phillips

To grow up is to discover what one is unequal to. — Adam Phillips

The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia. — Adam Phillips

Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it. — Adam Phillips

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. — Adam Phillips

Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical. — Adam Phillips

It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored - the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage. — Adam Phillips

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. — Adam Phillips

Everything depends on what we would rather do than change. — Adam Phillips

When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all that people have. — Adam Phillips

Everybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves. — Adam Phillips

Wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn't there — Adam Phillips

The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating. — Adam Phillips

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum. — Adam Phillips

The child can find out what the object ..might be only by finding ..obstacles to its access — Adam Phillips

The people we fall in love with we find singularly captivating, as are any of the people (or ideas) that inspire us, for better or for worse. — Adam Phillips

Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders. — Adam Phillips

Frustration that is unrecognized, unrepresented, cannot be met or even acknowledged; addiction is always an addiction to frustration (addiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met). What, then, is the relationship, the link, the bond, the affinity between frustration and satisfaction? How do we find ourselves fitting them together or joining them up? There may, for example, be something about frustration that makes it resistant to representation, as though our frustrations are the last thing on earth we want to know about. — Adam Phillips