Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

by Adam Phillips

Writings on madness fill entire libraries, but until now nobody has thought to engage exclusively with the idea of sanity; we define it simply as that bland and nebulous state of not being mentally ill. But what is sanity? How broad, how eccentric is its range of behavior? And how do we go about crafting a creative and fluid definition of a sane existence, one we can guide ourselves by? Madness is always present in our lives -- in the chaos of our experience as babies, the rebellion of our adolescence, the irrational nature of our sexual appetites. In a society governed by indulgence and excess, madness is the state of mind we identify with most keenly -- while it is ultimately destructive, we often credit it as the wellspring of genius, individuality, and self-expression. Sanity, on the other hand, confounds us; it lacks the false allure of madness. Hamlet, as Adam Phillips points out, is glamorous, while the eminently sane Polonius comes off as a fool. In Going Sane , Phillips redresses this historical imbalance, drawing deeply on literature and his rich experience as a clinician. He strips our lives back to essentials, focusing on how we -- as human beings, as parents, as lovers, as people to whom work matters -- can make space for a sane and well-balanced attitude to living. Phillips's brilliantly incisive and aphoristic style coaxes us into meeting his ideas halfway, and making them our own. In a world saturated by tales of dysfunction and suffering, he offers a way forward that is as down-to-earth and realistic as it is uplifting and hopeful.

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Essays, Mental Health, Ebooks

224 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2005

About the author

Adam Phillips is a British psychotherapist and essayist.

Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Phillips was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954, the child of second-generation Polish Jews. He grew up as part of an extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins and describes his parents as "very consciously Jewish but not believing". As a child, his first interest was the study of tropical birds and it was not until adolescence that he developed an interest in literature. He went on to study English at St John's College, Oxford, graduating with a third class degree. His defining influences are literary – he was inspired to become a psychoanalyst after reading Carl Jung's autobiography and he has always believed psychoanalysis to be closer to poetry than medicine.

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Phillips is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books. He has been described by The Times as "the Martin Amis of British psychoanalysis" for his "brilliantly amusing and often profoundly unsettling" work; and by John Banville as "one of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time."

Reviews

[E.G. Jönsson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had a number of issues with this book, which can be summed up as mostly relating to AP's interpretations of sex (too straight (off) Freudian), the conflation of neuropsychiatric conditions and mental health disorders like autism and schizophrenia (which I felt he mostly just used as imagery for his own devices), and the repetitive use of certain words (e.g. ineluctably). However, AP's vision of sanity is a rather charming one, perhaps best illustrated by this quotation from the very last pages: "The kindest thing a sane adult can do is assume that other people can make choices, while being mindful of the areas of people's lives in which choice does not apply ... and that humiliating another person is the worst thing we ever do." That I like.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read. Almost every sentence could stand alone as a quote. There is no useless phrase or idea in this whole book. It is a trove of wisdom, which made my jaw drop several times. I got this book from the library, and used a scanner to save three of the chapters for me to read later, because each successive idea rippled my brain and I HAD to read it over again to fully integrate it. This is a book that is to be perceived by the intuition, as well as the intellect--it must appeal to your soul, and if it resonates, keep reading! Others might not agree with Phillips' words, but their loss!

[Mark Valentine · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a powerful book! The final chapter is incredible! Even though in places, Phillips becomes a little repetitive, by the end his message becomes resoundingly clear. Sometimes it gets slippery because, throughout his essay, he references two different kinds of sanity, superficial and deep. Superficial sanity is the generic cultural sanity that demands compliance, conformity, and adaptation. As a school teacher, I am part of the system that stresses this in our culture.

But deep sanity challenges this premise by probing that society and its spawn, culture, are really artificial constructs that do not have the authority over an individual's quest for identity. Phillips opens the study by noting how a convicted murderer who had been confirmed schizophrenic needed to be found sane prior to his execution in order for the sentence to be interpreted as punishment. That is, the schizophrenic needed to be confirmed sane prior to the State taking his life so that his death would have meaning for those who remain.

His first chapter then moves to a study of Hamlet--which is appropo for me this summer--his tragedy, Phillips explores, lies in his personal artistry and bedazzlement not being understood--a misunderstanding frequent among artists; in essence, Hamlet challenges the tribal custom of revenge killings and is overcome by his questioning its efficacy. For Phillips, this shows that he is deeply sane rather than "mad" as Polonius calls him ("mad" or "madness" appears 36 times in the play--a word that in that decade was a neologism).

Phillips has chapters on sanity in sexual relationships, on financial matters as well as on autism, schizophrenia, and depression. But read, please, the final chapter. It made me sit up straight and challenged my own assumptions about society and the need to 'fit in.' To end, I feel the importance not to be dependent on others, to respect the randomness of existence, and to live for meaning regardless of the costs.

[G. Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating stuff, a really good read. Actually quite reassuring

[M. Sarki · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/160903...

…Those of us who don’t find madness inspiring are surprisingly short of options; and, at present, there is not much help available.

Being impelled to record notes while reading is always the most promising sign that once again I have stumbled onto a very important book. There is so much good to retain in Going Sane. But the reader should not be so naive as to not expect a bit of disjointed rhetoric when addressing the subject of sanity. Such a wide-ranging topic that would be difficult at best to pin down and keep focussed on. There are diversions to be expected in a concept so insanely complicated to explain.

…Imagining possibilities for ourselves involves telling stories about what we think we are like, what we think we want, and what we think we are capable of…

…The sanity of True Genius, we must assume, is that the True Genius is a fallen creature who can write—who can describe things—from the point of view of the unfallen…The sane genius transforms everything that might disturb us, “the wildest dreams,” into something that is familiar and reassuring…The horrifying, the dispiriting, the bizarre are made utterly convivial by the sane True Genius…Sanity checks the madness…only the sanity of True Genius can manage and bear madness…Madness requires genius to make it viable. Indeed, that may, ultimately, be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting…Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life; and this, for Lamb, is essentially a linguistic talent.

Thank goodness for great fiction and the courage it takes to read it. But then to see and understand the truth in fiction and apply it to our lives is where the trouble begins for most of us. Figuring out what makes one tick is key to enjoying a healthy and satisfying life. Exploring all options that come to mind is critical to developing an understanding of what one truly wants. This does not mean to act out every fantasy or dream one holds. It means to investigate the idea, the possibilities, to extend the behavior out by using reasoning in order to consider the consequences. To think we ever have life all figured out is insane at best. To understand and accept that the best we can hope for is a muddling through is infinitely more sane.

The infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures…It is, in fact, a form of madness to not know, to forget, to attack and trivialize what really makes you happy…The sane adult is aways smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests…It is the madness of modern human wanting not to want to know about its own wanting….

…The deeply sane must not betray their desire; the superficially sane accommodate their desire to the needs of others…The superficially sane tend to convince us that we are the products of our environments; arguing that if you give people the right upbringing and education, you will make them well adjusted. The deeply sane, on the other hand, tell us that there is always more to us than our environments; that there is something within us—call it genius or a life force or instincts or genes—that exceeds the world that we find, and to which we must pay our most serious attention because it is driving us, one way or another, into what we are and will be…

…The sane person’s first acknowledgement is that her life is moved more by luck than by judgment; she sees her relationships as coincidences rather than destinies, her talents as unearned gifts, her bodily life as genetically contingent, her parents as giving her a good or a bad chance, and so on. The only necessities her life has are the ones she ascribes to them. The second acknowledgement of the sane is that they are, peculiarly, animals who are often unconscious of what they want; and that some of the wants they are most conscious of serve to obscure their keener satisfactions. And this is because their third acknowledgment is that what they most want they must not have because it is forbidden them…

…Sanity should not be our word for the alternative to madness; it should refer to whatever resources we have to prevent humiliation.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Appetite and fear are inextricably connected; and all creatures are endangered by the fundamental project of meeting their needs. But the human creature meets his needs, in both senses; unlike every other animal. He must meet his needs in order to survive, and over time, he will have to become acquainted, too, with what he will learn to call his needs. And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites. Indeed the stories he will be told about his appetite – explicitly in words, and implicitly in the way his appetite is responded to by other people – is that it is, at least potentially, way in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy. He will be told, in short, that he is by nature greedy. He will discover, whether or not this is quite his experience, that he apparently always wants more than he can have; that his appetite, the lifeline that is his nature, that is at once so intimate and so obscure to him, can in the end drive him mad. He may be sane, but his appetite is not. This is what it is to be a human being; to be, at least at the outset, too demanding.

Satisfactions are of course possible but disappointment and disillusionment are unavoidable. At best one can develop a bearable sense of one’s limitations; at worst one is driven mad. Given one’s appetite – given the ways we have inherited of describing it – one becomes realistic, or one lives in the no man’s land of the tantrum and the grudge. To talk about appetite, in other words, is to talk about whatever it is that we have to complain about.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 101-102




All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places; in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death; in our vulnerability as organisms, or in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, or in our greedy depredation of them; in our Fall, or in our hubris. But all these catastrophes, one way or another, are linked to our appetites, as creatures who want, and who are driven by, what is at once necessary and missing from our lives. Our wants may be ‘constructed’ – given form by the language available in the culture – but that we want is not in doubt. It is whether our wanting has catastrophe built into it - whether our wanting is such that ruinous frustration or ruinous aggression is inevitable; or is indeed a necessity to keep wanting on the go – or whether our wanting is made unbearable only by the ways in which it is responded to, that is now in question. The language of sanity and madness provides a vocabulary for asking and answering questions about appetite.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 120-121



The sane adult is protective – and not only of children, but of himself and others – in a way that avoids covertly undermining the strengths of those who are apparently in need of protection (‘The friends of the born nurse / Are always getting worse,’ as W.H. Auden wrote). The sane adult assumes that it is possible for people to get pleasure from who they happen to be, and that part of this pleasure is bound up with versions of self-reliance that are not merely a more or less bitter denial of a need for other people. The two most dispiriting forms of modern relationship are the protection racket and the sadomasochistic contract in which, respectively, one person’s strength depends on the other person’s weakness, or one person’s pleasure depends upon the other person’s suffering. The sane person’s project is to find more appealing ways of being weak and strong; or to find alternative pleasures to the pleasures of power and of helplessness. The way most people are prone to see what they call human nature now makes even the thought of alternative forms of pleasure and excitement sound hopelessly naïve. It would be part of the sane person’s sanity to want new forms of pleasure in which neither one’s kindness nor one’s excitement are overly compromised (one emblem of this might be those gay men who experiment in coming without getting an erection). The sane person knows that being able to only be a nice person is the death of sexual excitement; and that being able to only be nasty is too isolating.

– Adam Phillips, Going Sane, p 234-235

[C.M. Subasic · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an intoxicating marvel! Poetry mix with psychology and language here, to explore the world of madness and sanity. Phillips argues that there are more definitions for madness in our culture than there are for sanity. We both love and are terrified of those 'eccentrics' in our midst, fearing that we are heading down the same slope, while also somewhat jealous of their freedom. He begins with a dive into literature, with Hamlet a central figure. This is followed by a look at our relationship to our sanity from a range of views. Sane sex, greed. He ends with an attempt at a definition for sanity.

Critics have assailed him for his lacklustre exploration of the literature. I personally found his insights and the poetry of his language... well, as I said, intoxicating. He does, on occasion write in a very dense style, where his love for spinning language seems to outweigh his desire to communicate the idea. (Was his editor intimidated by this man's ability?) But overall the book is a must for anyone interested in exploring the human psyche and most definitely, writers.

[Kirsten · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book had a lot of potential, but it ended up being pretty disappointing. The concept is intriguing: how do we define sanity? Why is easier to say that someone is mad than it is to say that they're sane?

Unfortunately, most of the book is sort of a morass of poorly organized writing and amorphous concepts that flow into one another without any real sense of what the author is trying to say. It wasn't until the final chapter that I really felt that I had a grasp on what Phillips is trying to say about sanity -- and by then it was really too late. I was really intrigued by this book when I picked it up, and I wish that it hadn't been so confusing and poorly written.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blasé. Blasé. Blasé.

This books dives in to a fascinating subject, but the author quickly lost me in his loquacious ramblings. You'll also get lost if you don't have a strong psychoanalytic background and are well read on the topic. Not for "lay" people like me.

[Susan]

So far, I have to say the author has made what the British would call a meal of the old cliche about the romanticism/attractiveness of madness. Have just finished Robert Pogue Harrison's wise book Gardens, in which he delves into the drama/narrative/restlessness that Western man is attracted to as craving, I don't know that I am buying into the glamor of madness thing currently. I will have to wait and see with this one -

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

some awesome bits and some real rubbish

[Aaron Ambrose · Rating 5 out of 5]

It starts unpromisingly. The first section is a maddeningly redundant exploration of how vague and slippery our concept of sanity is. Get on with it! Then Phillips hits his groove: doing some REAL digging, holding up the mystery jewel sanity and trying to discern its nature in the light it refracts on childhood, sex and - worth triple the cost of admission on its own merits - money. Phillips articulates the notions that have bounced around my mind for years, but find devastating clarity in his fearless, cheerful crafting. The final section is only his stab at defining what a modern sanity might look like. Is it the cagey compliance of “superficial” sanity? Or the questioning challenge of “deep” sanity? In typical Phillips fashion it’s a bit of both, depending. “One needs to be able to lie to the Gestapo, and tell the truth to one’s friends.” This book is already making my life better.

[nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phillipsova knjiga je subverzivna upravo u svojoj suptilnosti. Dok svi pokušavamo da budemo ‘razumni’, ne primjećujemo koliko je sama ideja razumnosti ideološki konstruisana. Ako ludilo nije samo suprotnost razumu, nego njegov nusproizvod, zar onda nije pokušaj da ‘budemo razumni’ ponekad najluđa stvar? Kao što je Lacan rekao – prava psihoza nije kada čujete glasove, već kada mislite da postoji neki Veliki Drugi koji zna šta znači biti razuman. Phillips nas vodi kroz ovo polje neodređenosti s elegantnim cinizmom – kao da kaže: možda nikada nećemo znati šta znači ‘biti zdrav’, ali bar možemo naučiti da budemo kreativno zbunjeni.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Sanity" is the supposed ideal but it seems like "madness" has all the fun. Read this book and you will be angered, confused, bewildered and much more. It's not suitable for actual children but essential for people who were formerly classified as such.

[Henry Punwar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, although being a nonfiction essay, is written very artistically. It talks bravely about topics that are often uncomfortable to speak on. This book was very important for me personally. Its casual tone is what gives it its charm but it could use some more sources and structure.

[Caroline · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Mrsculpepper · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of what it means to be sane.

[floratheexplorer · Rating 2 out of 5]

nice concept and enjoyed the start but just so repetitive and ranty

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ugh, GOLD. The nuance and exploration I'm craving. I hope it all integrates quickly as a form of self responsibility rather than defense. The chapters on sane sex and money blew my mind

[Cian Pearce · Rating 3 out of 5]

It felt like the book dragged on, and a few subchapters in part 2 felt offtopic, such as sex and childhood.

[Kerim Altuncu · Rating 4 out of 5]

For me this was a super quotable book, full of witty sentences and insightful analysis.

[Massimo Venegoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sanity is understanding the world is unpredictable and u controllable, while being able to be serene about it

[William Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Practically a booklet that should be read at least twice. It is a veritable spiritual nourishment for both the religious and the atheist. Should be read by everyone above 40. As an avid Jungian, I never in my wildest dreams thought that I might take to heart what a nihilist Freudian would say. But seriously, on p. 106 (of a 120 page edition), Phillips surprises me by saying, "The deeply sane ... tell us that there is something within us - call it genius or a life force or instincts or genes - that exceeds the world we find, and to which we must pay our most serious attention because it is driving us, one way or another, into what we are and will be." This sentence raises the question of why the Jungian approach is ignored at this juncture (and why Phillips, being early in his life so inspired by Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" that he took up psychology, completely turned away from his vision and adhered to Freud's). This book is an underhyped gem.

[Diana Polansky · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Culture corrupts. Madness renews."

"We are born insane fantasists who have to learn to temper fantasy with reality."

I'm going to say this must be a great book because my self-proclaimed "famous" professor assigned it and had us (1st year New School playwrights) adapt this book into a play. I look forward to either finding justification for my insane impulses, or "going sane". I also look forward to having this play produced as rumored--or is that an "insane fantasy" of mine?

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought provoking and fascinating books i have ever read. Adam Phillips is the most captivating, sensitive and logical psychoanalytic writer’s of his time. The book is beautifully written and dares to challenge humanities conception of ‘sanity’. I have read it five times in the past month it’s so fabulous! Any book lover should be honoured for it to grace their shelves.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

with so much written about madness/insanity, it's time to start writing about sanity...and this is a very good, thought-provoking start...

[April]

Best line so far......"It is not uncommon for parents of adolescents, like parents of the very young, to feel like they are being driven mad by their children."

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is Adam Philips still alive? If so, can I have his babies?

[Pra Hérica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review would have been better if I had rated it before finishing it.