Quotes from Adam Phillips

A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.

At its best monogamy may be the wish to find someone to die with; at its worst it is a cure for the terrors of aliveness. They are easily confused.

You can't have a desire without an inspiring sense of lack. What we do to our frustration to make it bearable – evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on – takes the sting out of its tail.

Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods--to our most passionate selves-- our lives can being to feel futile

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.

The people we fall in love with we find singularly captivating, as are any of the people (or ideas) that inspire us, for better or for worse.

Indeed psychoanalysis makes sense only as part of the larger cultural conversation in the arts that became known as modernism. Vienna, where Freud lived for virtually his entire life, was the eye of the storm of this modernism; and was the birthplace of the linguistic philosophy that came to dominate the twentieth century.

In our dreams we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can't eat them.

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.

Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring

wanting is what we do to survive, and we want only what isn't there

All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn't know you had (of one's formative frustrations, and of one's attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction.

Our excesses are the best clue we have to our own poverty, and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

We need, in other words, to know something about what we don't get, and about the importance of not getting it.

Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.

Before you have children, the novelist Fay Weldon once said, you can believe you are a nice person: after you have children you understand how wars start.

psychoanalysis is an account of how and why modern people are so frightened of each other. What

We can only be really realistic after we have tried our optimism out.

We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use.

Winnicott once referred to depression as the 'fog over the battlefield'.

When God is dead, kindness is permitted. When God is dead, kindness is all that people have.

as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by.

The sign that something does matter to us is that we lose our steadiness.

We don't have relationships to get our needs met, we have relationships to discover what our needs might be.