Houdini's Box Quotes

“For the unsure there is always a safe haven of compromise, of world-weary wisdom about the impossibility of satisfaction, and the noble truth in disappointment; whereas the convinced live in a different kind of inner superiority, the belief that they really know what everyone really wants, but that they are the only ones with the courage, the recklessness, the moral strength, or the good fortune to be capable of the ultimate satisfactions that life has to offer.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“There are parts of one’s life—one’s erotic preoccupations or professional inclinations, over food or leisure— where one just keeps repeating oneself, if not quite literally quoting oneself. So the not always obvious pleasure people take in their symptoms—if only by ironizing themselves as “characters”— always raises the question why, at this moment in their lives, they want to lose such an absorbing and upsetting pastime, to get rid of such an arresting concern?”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“All symptoms are a kind of geography. They take a person in certain directions, to certain places and not to others. They are a schedule of avoidances, a set of warning signals.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“The basic scenario was one person—usually the woman, whom he dreaded turning into—as unsure, formless, pliable, not knowing what if anything she liked—and another person, preferably him, of immense conviction and precisely formulated appetite (this person, if a child, would be called faddy, and if an adult, would be called, by some people, a pervert). That he needed to keep it so polarized, and that he lived as though this was the entire repertoire—one way or another everyone in the world could only be in one of these two positions—suggested to me that each was being used as a refuge from the other one. Instead of being able to move between (and through) these options (and into others), they had to be maintained in stark isolation.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“I thought that what he might discover if he could hold himself in that moment—stop being a man grabbing things on the supermarket shelves—was his supposed desire disintegrating; he would discover that he wasn’t quite so certain about what he wanted, or even if he wanted. And since he recognized himself as the person with fast certainties, this might feel like an unraveling, a black hole in which he would be flustered.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“What was at stake for him was not so much risk taking as the experiencing of the risk. He could bring the drama to climax—of fight or flight, as it were—but he was merely ridding himself of the drama. It was anticipation itself that had become a phobic object,because it ushered him towards a threshold of action. Between waiting and wanting and doing something about it there was a terror, a delay that seemed unbearable. There was a Jekyll of definite intent, and a Hyde fobbing him o with either satisfaction—the kiss “planted” as he would say—or evasion, the hurried (and harried) rush home.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“It was like alchemy, but in reverse;just as several of his girlfriends had been left feeling as if they could no longer imagine a person who could desire them. It wasn’t that they felt unattractive, but that they felt sexless, erotically blank. I, we, became forceful but impotent, full of ideas, but unalluring. We became informative—indeed, full of insight about him—but we lost our magic. It was a vanishing act. He would unknowingly conjure up the passionate self of his chosen woman only to exploit it. He could, that is to say, turn people into a caricature of themselves, or show them that passion was another word for bullying. Show them the stridency of their wants.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“No one can be indifferent to being ignored.”

“There isn’t any protection from it, there can’t be … Once it happens it can’t be unhappened … It’s like being haunted by someone who wants to forget about you … all the moments when one goes unnoticed.”

“There can be a freedom in those moments,” I said, and there was a long silence. It was as though I had insulted him. “When we’re ignored we just collapse back into our histories, into all the ways we coped … The problem is we get stuck with the ways we try and protect ourselves from it.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“Actually I always read to find something that will strike me … for the quotations, I read books as if they were dictionaries of quotations. It’s like the lottery.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“This might have hit you so hard because you’re on the other end of something that you’re more used to doing to other people.”

“Like?”

“Like not being attentive enough … disregarding whatever people happen to believe they’re entitled to. There’s no escape from that sort of thing if you’re the victim of it.” There was a silence, which I went on from. “If this is true, then I expect that this has been done to you before, and so you unwittingly do it to other people like a habit.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“What is being escaped from is often, as Ferenczi suggests, shrouded in mystery. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape

“What is being escaped from is often, as Ferenczi
suggests, shrouded in mystery. It is as though if we can keep ourselves sufficiently busy escaping, we can forget that that is what we are doing. The opposite of fear, one could say, is choice.”
― Adam Phillips, Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape