On Balance Quotes

“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, On Balance

“Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“We can only be really realistic after we have tried our optimism out.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“We don't have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can’t eat them.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“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, On Balance

“The sign that something does matter to us is that we lose our steadiness.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Getting lost, I want to suggest, is our best defence against being lost ; and partly because it makes us feel that we have, as it were, taken the problem into our own hands, turned, as psychoanalysts say, passive into active.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“It is not unusual for us to feel that life is too much for us. And it is not unusual to feel that we really should be up to it; that there may be too much to cope with — too many demands — but that we should have the wherewithal to deal with it. Faced with the stresses and strains of everyday life it is easy now for people to feel that they are failing; and what they are failing at, one way or another, is managing the ordinary excesses that we are all beset by: too much frustration, too much bad feeling, too little love, too little success, and so on. One of the things people most frequently say in psychoanalysis is, ‘Perhaps I am overreacting, but . . .’; and one of the commonest complaints today is about feeling too much or feeling too little. I want to suggest that we are simply too much for ourselves, but that this too-muchness is telling us something important… My proposition is that it is impossible to overreact. That when we call our reactions overreactions what we mean is just that they are stronger than we would like them to be. In other words, we sometimes call ourselves and other people excessive as a way of invalidating or tempering the truths we tell ourselves or that other people tell us. It is impossible to overreact.”
― Adam Phillips , On Balance

“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, On Balance

“We have the magic of art that we may not perish of the truth.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Sartre wrote, rebels are people who keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it ; revolutionaries change the world. The way things were going for her, Cinderella could easily have ended up as a rebel, as a girl who can't stop complaining.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Sartre wrote, are people who keep the world the same so they can go on rebelling against it ; revolutionaries change the world. The way things were going for her, Cinderella could easily have ended up as a rebel, as a girl who can't stop complaining.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Once you start describing sexuality as being about knowing people, both oneself and others, unanswerable questions begin to turn up. You begin to ask yourself questions like 'Do I really know X?' rather than 'Do I enjoy his company?”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“In this instance, we use our pleasure to justify the suffering of others, as if to say, if I am enjoying these objects, or these marvellous words that describe them, then I am not thinking about how they are made. In this instance, celebration is a cure for history-taking. We celebrate as a way of diverting our attention from a history we would prefer not to know about.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“In this instance, we use our plea sure to justify the suffering of others, as if to say, if I am enjoying these objects, or these marvellous words that describe them, then I am not thinking about how they are made. In this instance, celebration is a cure for history-taking. We celebrate as a way of diverting our attention from a history we would prefer not to know about.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Celebrations can help us forget what will happen after the celebrations are over.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“If anything, though, I think it may be truer to say that Arbus's work is more often showing us just how inviolable modern human privacy actually is ; however close or close up you get, you never get that close. And that there is something about modern life that generates fantasies of closeness, of intimacy, that are way in excess of human possibility”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“If you are troubled by not having been punished for something, then you might say you are being punished because it preys on your mind as guilt.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“After childhood, Anna Freud intimates, there is absolutely no perspective at all (in actuality the parents are no basis, no guide for what will follow or replace them). In their existential bewilderment - outside the orbit of the parents' love and its vagaries - adults, post-children, lose their ability to position themselves within this new space and are cognitively unable to map it.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“As long as you have got a map, any map, you are no longer lost ; as long as you have a certain kind of object of desire, you are no longer lost. We need a person to long for, an object of longing, because it orientates the excess, the complexity of our hearts and minds.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“The idealizing in contemporary culture - and not only in con temporary culture - of the resourceful individual, of the person who knows what he wants and how to get it, is an acknowledgement of this now widespread terror of frustration.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“The catastrophe of being a human being is that we are irredeemably helpless creatures. And that means, helpless to do anything about our helplessness. We are essentially helpless, and that is the very thing that makes our lives impossible. It is a mark of our own resistance to our helplessness that we deem the ineluctable to be catastrophic; as though any thing we don't make for ourselves is bad for us.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Obviously, if frustration makes us aggressive and we turn against our own satisfaction, we are unconsciously cultivating our violence by disavowing our helplessness.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Does our original helplessness make us moral, or is
morality prompted in us by the way we respond to
dependent others? It must be both.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“I want to consider in this essay Freud's story about helplessness with a view to making a case for it ; that is, as a case for helplessness as something we shouldn't want to think of ourselves as growing out of. We can become more competent but we shouldn't imagine that we become less helpless. The wonderful phrase 'learned helplessness' reminds us, of course, that if helplessness can be learned, it can also be unlearned.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Clare suggests, though he wouldn't have put it like this, that we need to hold on to what happens when we treat stories - and perhaps people - as if they are authentic. Whatever the authentic was, it gave us access to the other thing we value most, intense feeling and surprise.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“So-called delinquent behaviour is the unconscious attempt to find the rules that really matter to the individual. And this is one of the most - if not the most - frightening quests.”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance

“Be happy' can be a paradoxical injunction, like 'be spontaneous' ; if you do it you are not doing it, and if you are not doing it you are doing it”
― Adam Phillips, On Balance