On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored Quotes

“Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness -- meaning recognize it as yours -- then one can take some fear out of the world.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

“The tickling narrative, unlike the sexual narrative, has no climax.

Is the tickling scene, at its most reassuring, not a unique representation of desire and, at its most unsettling, a paradigm of the perverse contract?

Does it not highlight, this delightful game, the impossibility of satisfaction and of reunion, with its continual reenactment of the irresistible attraction and the inevitable repulsion of the object, in which the final satisfaction is frustration?”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

“It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long. And in this familiar situation, which evokes such intensities of feeling, we wait and we try to do something other than waiting, and we often get bored - the boredom of protest that is always a screen for rage.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

“Satisfaction for Rousseau is the death of possibility. So Rousseau needs not to master the obstacles, but to nurture them. Anticipation is the mother of invention. And in his commitment to innocence there is always the covert suggestion that nothing is forbidden, that we are not controlling ourselves, just finding ways of making what we don't do more exciting.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

“The desire does not reveal the obstacle; the obstacle reveals the desire”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored : Psychoanalysis Essays on the Unexamined Life

“No amount of "evidence" or research will convince the unamused that a joke is funny.”
― Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life