On Getting Better Quotes

“The patient, that is to say, may comply with the analyst’s need to cure them, just as a child might comply with the parent’s need to be a good parent. If the analyst’s project is to cure the patient – with all that that entails of omniscience, of knowing what’s best for someone – then the patient could get lost in his cure. Or, to put it in Milner’s words, ‘one must not set out to “cure” anyone by psychoanalysis’. Psychoanalytic treatment is an antidote to indoctrination; it is an enquiry into how people influence each other, into the individual’s history of living in other people’s regimes. Milner, Khan suggests, has added a ‘new dimension to the therapeutic effort of the analyst’.”
― Adam Phillips, On Getting Better

“that what the process of re-education known as psychoanalysis really does is to eliminate or recondition irrelevant avoidances and inadequate seekings.”
― Adam Phillips, On Getting Better

“Freud’s psychoanalysis – which is simply one more way of taking people seriously – adds to this that the patient also doesn’t know what he wants as yet, and has gone to great lengths not to know; and is anyway always conflicted around and about his wanting; that the patient also enjoys his suffering – the punishment of it, the inhibition in it; he enjoys his lack of enjoyment – and so doesn’t want to get better, or doesn’t only want to get better.”
― Adam Phillips, On Getting Better