On Giving Up Quotes

“For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it, for the requisite time. But for us, life is sustained, or not, by words about life; life as something we can live or something we might find we are not actually living, or might turn out not to have lived. As though it may not always be exactly death we fear but the death in life we might find ourselves living or having lived. As though one could live a life that could turn out not to have been one.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Winning may be a description of something it is not. You may be wrong about your supposed objects of desire. Wanting to win, or wanting not to lose, may be how you stop yourself wondering whether races are for you.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“You can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“The idea that life has an aim, or that happiness is what we want, may be simply a way of narrowing one’s mind, of oversimplifying oneself.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“To give something up is to seek one’s own assumed advantage, one’s apparently preferred pleasure, but in an economy that we mostly can’t comprehend, or, like all economies, predict.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“o poder do monoteísmo reside no fato de ser excludente: ele explora o terror que todos têm de serem excluídos. seu único poder real é o de intimidar”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“a crença sem curiosidade é uma das formas assumidas pela pulsão de morte. a crença sem curiosidade é estupidificante. e esse pode ser justamente seu objetivo.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“o censor nos diz quais sacrifícios valem a pena e o que precisa ser previsto; a censura, o que quer que ela seja, é sempre uma forma de previsão, uma necessidade de se colocar à frente.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“o que faz de um indivíduo um indivíduo são os modos pelos quais ele de desvia, improvisa ou modifica as normas disponíveis da chamada natureza humana; são os modos pelos quais esse indivíduo se torna a exceção que confirma a regra, e também, é claro, pelos modos como ele obedece às regras a seu modo particular.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“talvez não exista mais nada que possamos fazer, além de inventar relatos complementares e conflitantes sobre como somos e não somos os autores de nossas próprias vidas; sobre como haverá em nós sempre mais do que afirmamos saber a nosso respeito; sobre como sabemos, não sabemos e não podemos saber o que queremos.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“a exclusão é a via para o autorreconhecimento. uma identidade é aquilo que nos resta, que nos resta criar, depois de sermos excluídos: é a autocura para a alienação. desejar, pensar, questionar e imaginar é o que fazemos após a catástrofe da exclusão.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“If loss is the point and not the problem - and this doesn't stop us caring for and about each other - we may be less terrorized by it, and so less obsessed and impressed by it. We may then be able to understand and use Picasso's wonderful boast, 'I don't seek, I find.' Finding would be the point, and not losing. Loss would no longer be, as it were, an end in itself. When loss is not catastrophic loss, it is a form of stage fright.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“And yet, nothing narrows our minds like loss; if one of our most urgent desires is to narrow our minds, to simplify and oversimplify ourselves, then loss certainly does the trick. If profit is there to offset loss; if salvation is there to cure us of absence; if pleasure is there to help us forget its transience, then we clearly think of ourselves, to use that most pernicious and misleading term, as essentially potential losers (we know of course that only winners can make losers, and wanting to be either is the problem). But if we are essentially elegiac creatures - obsessed only by what we have lost, or can or will lose - we should note that no other animal seems so similarly stricken.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Clearly the censor is on the side of repression and on the side of the forbidden material (it is not militantly competent, it isn't wholehearted; that is, there is some complicity between the censor and the forbidden desire). By being good at making compromises, the individual's desire is never compromised.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“It is a story of the cost and the inventiveness required of the unwelcome immigrant. His most useful weapon, which is also a shield, is his capacity for self-censorship, for dissimulation. Immigrants need, whatever else they need, to be good actors. And actors, one might say, are master censors. They have to censor all the words their part does not require. And yet, of course, we don't think of actors as censoring themselves, or engaged in dramatic acts of self-censorship. The capacity for survival, Freud intimates, depends upon a capacity for cunning self-censorship. But presumably, over time, like the leopards in the temple, we can become so habituated to our own dissimulations that we become them; they become integral to the ceremony of being oneself.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“So what would the censors have to love — other than change itself — to be interested in change? What might make the censors give ground? How does our taste change, and why would we want it to? What Freud is saying — what Freud adds to this fundamental cultural conversation — is that we are obedient, unconsciously, to internal authorities. But we don't call it that, we call it our preferences, our prejudices, our beliefs and convictions, what we take for granted, what goes without saying. We are unconscious, Freud suggests, of what we have consented to, and that we are consenting (I might say this is just who I am rather than giving an account of what my masters want from me and for me). In the Freudian story, censorship is where we start from. We begin with, and in relation to, our censors (so development could be described as the history of our relationship to censorship, censorship by others and self-censorship).”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Censorship, that is to say, bespeaks a world calculated in advance (it is wishfulness and wilfulness disguised as prophecy); a world in which we recognize what is a temple and what is not, what is a sacrificial pitcher and what is not. A world in which there could not possibly be leopards in the temple. The censor tells us what the sacrifices are that are worth making, and what needs to be calculated in advance; censorship, whatever else it is, is always calculation in advance, always needing to keep ahead of itself. And once the censors fail, something opens up; if the leopards had been kept out of the temple, we would have had no parable, nor the myriad interpretations it seems to invite.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Psychoanalysis, as presented here by Freud, was difficult to classify, or even to clearly describe; but it was, for him, its founder, about curiosity. Psychoanalysis, that is to say, as being essentially about curiosity, rather than, or as well as, about knowledge, or even cure. Psychoanalysis being about, among other things — to refer back to my quotations from Ferenczi and Lacan — the way in which knowledge, the will to knowledge, can itself be a defence against curiosity; and also that the will to cure and be cured can be a foreclosing of curiosity. Curiosity, one might say in this context, being an essential human concern; and not least because it tends to undo, to dissolve, essentialisms; because it tends towards the unknown, and the potentially unknowable.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Freud showed us how we are endangered by just how unconsciously prolific, and disparate, and conflicted our minds are. So without knowing what the greatest and most important things are, without unifying ideas, without infallibly coherent ideologies, what is to be done? What are people going to have, as we say, in common, or what are they going to want to have in common? And when, to paraphrase Kafka, we have so little in common with ourselves; why we have so little in common with ourselves, and why we don't want to have much in common with ourselves, being precisely what Freud was formulating in his psychoanalytic writing. What kinds of sociability, of relationship, will be possible, both with other people and with oneself, in the light of this despair about our sociability? Where should our curiosity about ourselves begin?”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“An identity is what you are left with, what you come up with, after being left out: it is a self-cure for alienation. Desiring and thinking and questioning and imagining are what we do after the catastrophe of exclusion. We are shocked into necessary forms of self-identification. We try to make ourselves recognizable to ourselves and others, as though the foundation of what we call identity is not having one. On Kafka's principle — I can't really swim because I was originally unable to swim — since I didn't originally have an identity I don't really have one. 'Do you know who I am?' the excluded say to their excluders, and then proceed to tell them, or try to tell them. And to tell themselves.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Neither Freud nor Kafka is saying 'tell me what you feel excluded from and I will tell you who you are', but they are saying that feeling left out is constitutive of who we take ourselves to be. Or even that so-called identity may be our self-cure for experiences of exclusion, that identities are the artefacts we make as the solution to being left out. We organize ourselves around these experiences of exclusion, and we narrow our minds to deal with them. And identity, like exclusion, makes us violent.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“Neither Freud nor Kafka is saying 'tell me what you feel excluded from and I will tell you who you are', but they are saying that feeling left out is constitutive of who we take ourselves to be. Or even that so-called identity may be our self-cure for experiences of exclusion, that identities are the artefacts we make as the solution to being left out.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“In an anti-essentialist psychoanalysis - a psychoanalysis that doesn't use the Oedipus complex, or sexuality, or the death instinct to simplify ourselves with, uses them as informing but not defining features - we can say that we are so disturbed by the proliferation and variety and diversity and unpredictability of our desire that we are always tempted to actively narrow our minds by claiming to know what we want, and sticking to it; there may, that is to say, be nothing more defensive, nothing more distracting, nothing more omniscient, than believing you know what you want (as though wanting at its worst is akin to addiction).”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“For Freud, surprise and bewilderment inspired a need for explanation, rather than an appetite for surprise and bewilderment. So he concludes that it is 'forces of conscience which forbid the subject to gain the long-hoped-for advantage from the fortunate change in reality'. It is one thing to want something in fantasy, but for it to be gratified in reality is dangerous: it may be a forbidden wish, or an overwhelming pleasure, or a pleasure that creates a dependence; or it may be an enviable pleasure and invite attack. Our pleasures and satisfactions might be at the cost of other people's deprivation and suffering. There are, that is to say, lots of good and interesting reasons, and lots of good and interesting reasons flagged up by psychoanalysis, why pleasure is a problem; why we need, in Bion's useful formulation, to learn to suffer pain and to suffer pleasure.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up

“There is no simple, self-evident morality or truth available for them; what counts as a plus and minus in life is not obvious. We might extrapolate this and say that James's twice-born have suffered a kind of catastrophic disillusionment - perhaps about their first-born selves - and they are in need of something else, of something more. The life of the first-born self hasn't worked for them.”
― Adam Phillips, On Giving Up