Terrors and Experts Quotes

“It is, indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions, as though the aim of psychoanalysis was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realize how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much sense, or makes sense of too much, it turns into exactly the symptom it is trying to cure: defensive knowingness. But there is nothing like sexuality, of course, for making a mockery of our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards. We are excited by the oddest things, and sometimes people.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“If psychoanalysis doesn't also facilitate the patients' capacity not to know themselves, it becomes merely another way of setting limits to the self; and the analyst becomes an expert on human possibility, something no one could ever be, despite the posturing of our own favourite authorities.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“If the environment had been as it should have been, the mind-object would have been unnecessary; its very existence signifies insult and betrayal (this is the root of hatred of the mind, of its very existence; for some children and adolescents, failing at school is the only alternative to psychosomatic illness as a self-cure. To sabotage the mind becomes a way of returning to the body).”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“As the voice of glum realism, psychoanalysis has been perhaps a little too keen — suspiciously over-eager — to tell us persuasive stories about the necessities of frustration ('Everyone who practices renunciation', Adorno remarks, 'gives away more of his life than is given back to him').”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“Mourning is immensely reassuring because it convinces us of something we might otherwise easily doubt: our attachment to others. The protracted painfulness of mourning confirms something that psychoanalysis had put into question: how intransigently devoted we are to the people we love and hate. Despite the evidence of our dreams, our capacity for infinite substitution is meagre. In this sense mourning has been a ballast for the more radical possibilities of psychoanalysis. It is the rock, so to speak, on which Prometheus founders.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“The function of anxiety is to sever the future from the past; the function of fear - of fear as a version of realism - is to make an unknowable future out of the past.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“So in fear we assume the future will be like the past; and we believe — that is, behave as if — we know what that past was like. Fear, in other words, makes us too clever; or at least misleadingly knowing. Knowing becomes rather literally the process of jumping to conclusions. In fear the wish for prediction is immediately gratified; it is as though the certainty — the future — has already happened.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“For Sartre, fear is refusal of the self-knowledge that tells you your future selves are unknowable; they cannot be predicted, they can only be performed. They are constituted by choice, not inflicted by some prior agency called the past, or instincts, or the unconscious. For Freud, fear is our acknowledgement, however disguised, of the past: an involuntary self-knowledge. For Freud, self-knowledge can only be knowledge of past selves, which, for Sartre, is precisely what renders self-knowledge absurd. For Sartre, knowing oneself is a form of bad faith.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“In the original fear of loss of love we have to imagine that the child is poised between (or straddles) epistemological conviction from the past - the certainty that presence is shadowed by absence - which is also a form of profound scepticism - the terrifying uncertainty generated by the fact that presence is shadowed by absence. The child 'knows' both things, both the certainty and the uncertainty.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“It is, of course, a fundamental form of tyranny to coercively ascribe a fear to someone (or to coercively describe a person, or a part of a person, as unequivocally bad).”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“And this fits, I think, with what is, developmentally, a central paradox for the child (though its repetition during adolescence is often more vivid): a good-enough environment can only be constituted by putting it at risk (like a good-enough theory).”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“Psychoanalytic theory, in other words, is peculiarly adept at decontextualizing the lives it seems to explain (it is worth asking of any theory, What does it need to get rid of in order to work?). Psychoanalysts run the risk of believing that there is a King's English of the psyche and everybody is, or should be, speaking it.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“Suffering, like desire, turns privacy into secrecy. From a psycho-analytic point of view a symptom is a (secret) way of asking for something (forbidden).”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“Difference or defensiveness has always been a dilemma that psychoanalysis has been unable to deal with. Is the patient different from the analyst's description of him, or merely resistant to the analyst's interpretation? And who is in a position to decide?”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“The translator's word 'bestow' sounds quaint now, but it accurately captures the sense of desire as something conferred. For the child, like the adult, desire is experienced as a gift: we privilege people with our desire for them, though they don't always recognize quite what an honour they are being given.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“When two people speak to each other, they soon become inextricable: words are contagious.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“But as each theorist offers us a new redescription of the unacceptable — of what we are suffering from, of what we have to fear — they become, by the same token, the masters of our suffering. By punctuating our unhappiness, they make it legible. Like religious or political leaders, they tell us persuasive stories about where the misery comes from, and hence, by implication, what we might do about it. They want to change our (and their) relationship to the fear they have formulated for us. The expert constructs the terror, and then the terror makes the expert. If you are part of the solution, you are part of the problem. Experts, in other words, can give us descriptions that allow us to be unhappy in new ways.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“Describing people as the (sole) authors of their own lives is another way of punishing them.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“And psychoanalysis becomes an ironic critique, a virtual burlesque of the ethos of technology, seeing efficiency as a form of bad faith. From a psychoanalytic point of view our mistakes, our aberrations, our moments of distraction define us (inspiration is interruption): our incoherence is vital.”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts

“To walk into a psychoanalyst's consulting room, like being born into a family, is to walk into a very elaborate family of stories about who one is supposed to be. But if analysts can help patients discern the family stories they have inherited, who can help the patients, and the analysts, with the analysts' stories?”
― Adam Phillips, Terrors and Experts