Quotes from Adam Phillips

It is unrealistic to assume that if all goes well in a child's life, he or she will be happy. Happiness is not something one can ask of a child. Children suffer in a way that adults don't always realize under the pressure their parents put on them to be happy.

indeed that is what our lives are, a project of recovery and restitution; or we have to ironize our always wanting to get something back that we never had and that never existed anyway

Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism.

Ä°nsanlar bizi hüsrana uÄŸratarak gerçeklik duygusu kazan?r; hüsran duygusu yaratmad?klar? müddetçe fantezi figürleri olarak kal?rlar.

It is, of course, Wilde's point that socialism interferes with sociability.

A story is told of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's early followers, who once interviewed a prospective patient at great length, taking a detailed family history, and getting as elaborate an account as possible of what the man was suffering from. At the end of this three-hour consultation Adler apparently said to the man, 'What would you do if you were cured?' The man answered him, and Adler said, 'Well, go and do it then.' That was the treatment.

Morality born of intimidation is immoral.

We have the magic of art that we may not perish of the truth.

Anyone who remains a Freudian, a Kleinian, a Lacanian, a Winnicottian and so on has got stuck in, stuck with, their fear of their chosen Master.

Åžayet kendinden talep edilene -a??r? sevgi talebine- boyun eÄŸmeyen Cordelia gibi hüsrana uÄŸratan konumundaysan?z, o zaman baÅŸka tür bir otoriteye, gerçekçi biçimde verebileceÄŸiniz ÅŸey üzerinde bir otoriteye sahipsinizdir: "Efendimizi sevmem gerektiÄŸi kadar seviyorum./ Ne daha çok ne daha az" s. 17

On one occasion she (Milner) said to me 'Winnicott really believed, you know, that playing was the only real reality … he thought play, all creativity was sheer magic … that if people can play, anything can happen'. So, I said to her, 'What's wrong with thinking playing is reality, that creativity is magic?' And she said, 'It meant that he believed he could help anyone and everyone, that he was magic because he could play'.

No amount of "evidence" or research will convince the unamused that a joke is funny.

The first psychoanalytic patients were people who, by definition, did not fit in, people speaking the wrong language, a language of bizarre physical symptoms, a language very unlike the language of science, and for which science suggested itself as the great explainer. These people were suffering, in Freud's view...from the ordeals of intimacy.

the poet William Blake wrote in his 'Proverbs of Hell' that 'The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom', he wasn't joking?

Perhaps as part of growing up we need to be excessive – to try to break all the rules just to be able to find out what, if anything, the rules are made of, and why they matter.

Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear. An addiction is an unformulated frustration.

The child, the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott writes, can 'use doubt about food to hide doubt about love'; doubt about love is doubt about resources.

Two's company, three's a couple.

The child, like Greene himself, is a traveller; the adult has arrived:

The ways we miss our lives is life', Randall Jarrell quoted by A.P.

In shame there is a loss of interest in the external world, and a loss of interest in what is or may be good about the self. Shame is the ethnic cleansing of the self.

We always have competing wants, they are often incompatible, so in making choices essentials are sacrificed. Lives are tragic not merely when people can't have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them; when what they want entails an unbearable loss.

People are histrionic to get people thinking about them. We are excessive when something about ourselves needs to be recognized and we need other people to help us work out what it is.

Nothing I know matters more Than what never happened. John Burnside, 'Hearsay