Side Effects Quotes

“It is perhaps not incidental that guilt often makes people aggressive, and that therefore making people feel guilty often provokes the very thing it is trying to avert.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Reconstructing, documenting, witnessing, analysing and publicizing atrocities does not seem to diminish their scope or scale.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“There is a wishful belief underlying the redemptive myth of memory which is that what is to be remembered–if we remember the right things in the right way–is on the side of our well-being, and even of our virtuousness. Remembering done properly will give us the lives that we want. Even that memory can keep us kind. Whereas we know, in another part of our minds as it were, that memory is only ever as virtuous as its users.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“The paranoiac is the person who has realized that he is no different from anyone else. So his singularity–and the importance of singularity–becomes his hobby-horse (the contemporary preoccupation with finding one’s voice is clearly a derivative of this). The idea of individuality may emerge at the point at which it begins to occur to people that there may be no such thing. People may be unique, but their uniqueness may be insignificant.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“It is the paranoiac’s primary project, as Trotter shows in such interesting detail, to single himself out; never to be, at least in his own eyes, merely one among many. So hatred and the provocation of hatred, which always go together, are integral to the structure of paranoid modernism.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Paranoia, one might say, is the ambition to go on believing in ambition. And the ambitions of the modernist novelists are exemplary, for Trotter; these novelists, and the heroes of their novels, are insistently preoccupied by the nature, if any, of their expertise, by the ironies of their ambitions. What, these writers wonder, is the ambition to be a novelist an ambition to be? What kind of symbolic capital do writers have that bankers or lawyers or psychiatrists don’t?”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“From the point of view of desire, in my sense of it, we are not lacking what we find; the notion of lack is our retrospective rationalization, our coherent narrative, about finding as recovering. There can be addition where nothing was previously missing.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“The perversion version of ourselves seems to know, seems to register, exactly what turns us on; what absorbs and possesses us; what makes us dreamy. And yet, Lacan suggests, this is itself a cover story; this is how we ablate our terror, this is how we assuage the enigma of our desiring.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“When Winnicott dedicated Playing and Reality ‘to my patients who have paid to teach me’ he was acknowledging something very simple: the analyst teaches only through his capacity to learn from people who can’t be taught. It is a revolutionary idea that being listened to could be an education.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Learning to speak and listen–like the experience of dreaming–is quite unlike learning to be a hairdresser or to create a revolution. It has no pre-formed content. It has no predictable outcome. It discovers the object of desire rather than knowingly anticipates it. It experiments with wanting and being wanted, because wanting and being wanted are always an experiment. But unlike scientific experiments they can never be replicated.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“The child as an intelligent pragmatist knows that the truth is what it is good to believe. It is a tool rather than a necessity; the stork gets him where he wants to be at this moment. The child can be taught only what he wants to know. Of course he can learn to recite the facts of life–he can become a person who ‘knows’ such things–but it won’t much matter to him.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“For these philosophers solitude makes you doubt what common life distracts you from; for Lacan the unique solitude of the analytic situation makes you think and desire in a way that common life outside the consulting room will never let you. There is clearly a link to be made between philosophical doubt–beginning to fear for one’s own foundations–and the emergence (and emergency) of desire.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“To desire is to be doubly left out; left out from the presence of the object of desire, and left out of the desiring of one’s objects of desire. Wanting and a certain kind of aloneness are inextricable; as Barthes wrote, in one’s mind it is never the other who waits.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Or we might feel that what we call desire is evoked by details, by signs, by gestures; that we fall for a smile or a tone of voice or a way of walking or a lifestyle, and not exactly for what we have learned to call a whole person; and that this evocation, this stirring of desire, releases us rather more into our own deliriums of fear and longing than into realistic apprehension of the supposed object of desire. There is nothing at once more isolating and oceanic than falling for someone.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Language is to the speaker and listener what the dream-day is to the dreamer, idiosyncratically enlivening.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“We must learn to desire with guile and without hope; to love in conflict, rather than betraying our desire in fantasies of harmony. We must, in short, take our pleasures where we may. And speak as well as we can of what we want. People have not been keen to recognize that the Reality Principle was Freud’s most exciting idea.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“Bad now means traumatic, but traumatic is not simply or solely the things that happen to oneself; or, rather, one’s desire can feel like something that happens to oneself, like having an attack of one’s own nature. So ‘trauma’ becomes another word for living a life. For Freud, in other words, we are in shock; in shock, but wishing our way through. It is as though there is a design flaw in the human animal; our childhood is more than our development can cope with. We are all in recovery from having been children.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself

“There is nothing more defensive, Freud implies, than understanding what one is saying.”
― Adam Phillips, Side Effects: On Forgetting Yourself