Adam Phillips

From 'On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored"
"Psychoanalysis is a story-and a way of telling stories, that makes some people feel better"

"Psychoanalysis-as a form of conversation-is worth having only if it makes our live more interesting, or funnier, or sadder, or more tormented, or whatever it is about ourselves that we value and want to promote; and especially if it helps us find new things about ourselves that we didn't know we could value."

"people have traditionally come for psychoanalytic conversation because the story they are telling themselves about their lives has stopped, or become too painful, or both."

"It is of course difficult to conceive in psychoanalytic terms of an absence that is not, in some way, anticipatory."

From "The Beast in the Nursery"
"All our stories are about what happens to our wishes"

"How do we decide what a good story about wanting is?"

"even to want death you have to be alive. Morality is the way we set limits to wanting; the way we redescribe desiring so that it seems to work for us."

"Desire without something that resists is insufficient, wishy-washy, literally immaterial; it meets with nothing-nothing but itself...but a world that too much resists my desire is uninhabitable, unlivable."

"the world we desire is more real than the world we passively accept."

"The child, it seemed to Freud, was the virtuoso of desire, for whom the meaning of life could only be its satisfactions."

"that imaginative hunger called curiosity, which is part of what I'm calling the love of life."

"Freud implies there are three things we have to be able to do (to go on making and taking our pleasures): involve other people, make good our losses, and enjoy (or at least tolerate) conflict."

"inspiration is the best word we have for appetite, and that appetite is the best thing we have going for us."

"And as children take for granted, lives are only livable if they give pleasure: that is, if we can renew our pleasures, remember their intensities...and so be delighted by hope."

"psychoanalytic theory....is a set of stories about how we can nourish ourselves to keep faith with our belief in nourishment, our desire for desire."

"So how do we become sufficiently interested in our lives to want to go on living them if...interest is something we make?"

"under what condition is interest made, and how do we manage, or plot, to lose it."

"the fact that we are interested at all-and our preconditions for being interested-are every bit as telling as what we happen to be interested in."

"psychoanalysis is the art of making interest out of interest that is stuck"

"every object of desire is an obscure object of desire; leading us to ask both, why this rather than that, and why anything at all?

"It is assumed that there is regret built into desire, because it is imagined by the infant as an act of robbery and damage..."