Going Sane Quotes

“Sanity, as the project of keeping ourselves recognizably human, therefore has to limit the range of human experience. To keep faith with recognition we have to stay recognizable. Sanity, in other words, becomes a pressing preoccupation as soon as we recognize the importance of recognition. When we define ourselves by what we can recognize, by what we can comprehend- rather than, say, by what we can describe- we are continually under threat from what we are unwilling and/or unable to see. We are tyrannized by our blind spots, and by whatever it is about ourselves that we find unacceptable.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“Winnicott once referred to depression as the 'fog over the battlefield'.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“Sanity should not be our word for the alternatives to madness; it should refer to whatever resources we have to prevent humiliation.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“Stories about kindness are traditionally about our falling short. That we think of ourselves now as the kind of creatures who want a humiliating morality is a part of our morality. We know ourselves most happily as diminished things. The sane want to know whether we can really love anything other than the bad news about ourselves.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“The deeply sane, on the other hand, tell us that there is always more to us than our environments; that there is something within us—call it genius or a life force or instincts or genes—that exceeds the world that we find, and to which we must pay our most serious attention because it is driving us, one way or another, into what we are and will be.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“We are living now in the aftermath of the horrifying consequences of politically designed Good Lives; of the most militant and coercive blueprints of what people should be and want and do with their lives.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“In this way, those madder parts of the self—the autistic solutions to separation, the sense of being controlled, of having no boundaries—are more like modern human predispositions, talents for dealing with the unbearable. Thus, not being able to be mad, not being able to have recourse to mad solutions, would itself be a disability. Sanity in its narrower definitions deprives us of some necessary tools. It allows us neither our full range of emotional reactions to situations—whether terror, bewilderment, or ecstasy—nor our most effective forms of self-protection against them.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“If sanity is defined by how intelligible we are to each other, then we are living under tremendous pressure to be as transparent as possible. The problem may not be always or only how to better understand each other (and ourselves), but actually what we should do with whatever we don’t understand.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“The sanity lost in the madness of love is the sanity of knowing who one is. Only a culture that believes people could and should know themselves would have a use for the idea of sanity, because sanity is nothing if not the capacity and talent for self-recognition. But how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self? To know one’s limits is to limit oneself to the self that one knows. So, sanity also always describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use for protection against catastrophic change. If it is part of our sanity to know ourselves, we have to ensure that what we know keeps us sane.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“But the human creature meets his needs, in both senses; unlike every other animal. He must meet his needs in order to survive, and over time he will have to become acquainted, too, with what he will learn to call his needs. And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites. Indeed, the stories he will be told about his appetite—explicitly in words, and implicitly in the way his appetite is responded to by other people—is that it is, at least potentially, way in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy. He will be told, in short, that he is by nature greedy. He will discover, whether or not this is quite his experience, that he apparently always wants more than he can have; that his appetite, the lifeline that is his nature, that is at once so intimate and so obscure to him, can in the end drive him mad. He may be sane, but his appetite is not. This is what it is to be a human being: to be, at least at the outset, too demanding.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“Are adults people who are even better at being children than children are? Or are they precisely the opposite; are they, in fact, those who are able to relinquish the pleasures of childhood? What exactly is supposed to develop in development?”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“Adaptation means losing the life you think you are protecting.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“The sane, Mr. Meagles intimates, are people plagued by suspicions of their own madness. Such life as they have is lived in quarantine. But people are always persecuted by what they protect themselves from. Just as the overprotected child assumes there must be terrifying things out there if he needs so much protection, and can’t stop thinking about them, and lives in fear; by the same token, the sane are those obsessed by their own madness.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“We have outdone all other animals in the range of our symptoms. And our relationship to these madnesses—these irrationalities that plague us—has been profoundly ambivalent. People have never been quite sure whether madness refers to the more bizarre forms of malfunctioning, of diseases, that human beings are prone to; or whether, in fact, human beings are intrinsically mad—an exaggeration, perhaps, even potentially a disability, but not essentially alien.Should the project be to attempt to cure ourselves, or to attempt to accept ourselves as we are?”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

“It is as though there is something about sanity that we don’t want to go into, that we shy away from. And in this sense sanity is more like a forbidden object of desire: something we are dissuaded from being interested in but can never get away from. And like all forbidden objects of desire—like the man or woman of our dreams—it brings with it the fear that it may not exist, and the wish that it does not exist (after all, if it does exist, what are we going to do with it when we find it?). We tend to downplay sanity’s significance, but are somehow attracted to it. Just as we never know whether something is a figment because it is forbidden, or forbidden because it is in fact a figment, we are never quite sure whether sanity is worth bothering with.”
― Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness