The Beast in the Nursery Quotes

“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“If we describe ourselves as living, at least at the very beginning, as though we control the resources—the mother, as Winnicott says, fitting in with the infant’s omnipotence to sustain the illusion that she is his creation—then what we call rage might be the first stage of some process of enlightenment. The dispelling of a primal illusion. The simple and clearly avoidable acknowledgment that there are other people in the world; the celebration of our transience. Rage as our first tribute to otherness, both the otherness within and the otherness without. And yet, we can only ironize, but never, apparently, dissolve the grandiosity of our sense of entitlement. But then if we lost our rage, we would lose our link to childhood”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“And there is, as everyone knows, an uneasy tension between the so-called rights of man and the individual’s always recondite, unconscious sense of what he is due. I am secretly privileged: I have needs that I think of as my rights; my life is ritualized prestige. And yet I am one among others. As every child soon notices, however important he is—however beautiful or loved or clever—he is also nothing special.There is always a point of view—that will forever haunt him—from which he is of no interest.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“In rage we make our presence felt, if only to ourselves. Our excitement is like a reminder, a sign of life. Or a hope that we can redress the searing humiliation of being ignored when we are in need of something.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“Anger, then, is only for the engaged; for those with projects that matter (not the indifferent, the insouciant, the depressed). That is to say, those for whom something has gone wrong but who “know,” in their rage, that it could be otherwise. Whether from inside through the silent working of a putative death instinct, or from outside through the always frustrating other who never gives us enough of something or other, there is a rupture. At its most minimal our picture is of something interrupted, an epiphany of obstacles. Of a creature unavoidably deflected from its aim (of satisfaction, of justice, of mastery, of “more life,” of dying in its own way). Our rage speaks of intrusion and sabotage and betrayal, but also, paradoxically, of insistence and refusal and hope.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“From the point of view of the dreaming self, learning is a sublimation of desiring; there is no learning without desire, or none, in Winnicott’s language, that is “felt as real.” The dreaming self cannot be schooled in the traditional sense because it always chooses its teachers; any available cultural canon is simply like the dream day for the dreamer (in this sense, the dreamer is always deschooling society). From an unknowable (unconscious) set of criteria a person, unbeknown even to himself, picks out and transforms the bits he wants; the bits that can be used in the hidden projects of unconscious desire (we are bound to our lives by the feeling we have for ourselves). In this process, that is like a kind of sleepwalking solitary self-education, the Freudian subject is, as it were, the Victorian autodidact romanticized. Dreamwork is unforced labor.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“Psychoanalysis—as both theory and practice—can also dispirit people by making them better able to endure their ungainly fit with the culture (being able to bear the people and the institutions we depend upon is called masochism). The reassuring actions of so-called insight—the how-I-came-to-be-who-I-am stories—are a poor substitute for people’s capacity to transform their worlds (as children do in their theory-making, and as we all do in dreamwork). Psychoanalysis should not be promoting knowledge as a consolation prize for injustice.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“Psychoanalysis—as both theory and practice—can also dispirit people by making them better able to endure their ungainly t with the culture (being able to bear the people and the institutions we depend upon is called masochism). The reassuring actions of so-called insight—the how-I-came-to-be-who-I-am stories—are a poor substitute for people’s capacity to transform their worlds (as children do in their theory-making, and as we all do in dreamwork). Psychoanalysis should not be promoting knowledge as a consolation prize for injustice.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“So what I want to make out of Freud’s early papers about the child as theorist—the child who is an artist because he wants to be a failed scientist—is a simple proposal: that we should all be essentialists trying to be pluralists, and pluralists trying to be essentialists. That we should want to commit ourselves, as persuasively and eloquently as possible, to both sides of the line at once. That we should sustain the conflicts inside us and not be trying to resolve it. From a psychoanalytic point of view, children are essentialists; contemporary adults don’t have to be. There is no way of having it without having it both ways. If we don’t, we may, like Freud’s civilized children, simply lose interest, lose heart, become too eagerly too old for pleasure.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“A trauma, one could say, is a set of bewildering, unconscious instructions.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“Defensiveness is a talent for willfully reading clues, for not paying sufficient attention to our attention; for preferring safety to whatever else is around.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“Ordinary language assumes, in other words—as did Freud, at least in his earlier work—that interest is something we’ve already got. We start, as it were, from a position of interest (indeed, all our ways of pathologizing people are descriptions of their losing interest in the appropriate things, or rather, ideals).”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

“We cannot help but transform our experience—Freud’s emblem for this is dreamwork—and we cannot help but express ourselves. Whether we like it or not,we are making something of what we are given, even when we are merely making do. People come for psychoanalysis when they are feeling undernourished, and this is because—depending on one’s psychoanalytic preferences—either what they have been given wasn’t good enough, so they couldn’t do enough with it, or because there is something wrong with their capacity for transformation. In James’s terms, they are the failed artists of their own lives.”
― Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites