Going Sane [Adam Phillips]

“It would be sane now to work out how we have become the only animals who can’t bear themselves, and how, if at all, we might become the animals who can. [xxi]
“When we really desire something, or someone, our resistance is likely to take the form of our thinking it too difficult, or not worth the trouble, or impossible.” [28]
“Like all forbidden objects of desire-like the man or woman of our dreams-it bring 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?)
“should we in short, think of our madness, our symptoms, as a toolkit we have evolved for dealing with reality, for getting by; or should we think of them as a kind of truancy from our lives, an evasion of what we need to do, a weakness?” [31]
“…be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting. Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life…” [48]
“as though knowing or acknowledging certain things that are going on around you might drive you mad….” [52]
“our belief in sanity may be the last enclave of our now age-old belief in progress and redemption.” [55]
“the contest between sanity and madness is therefore about the transparency of our intentions, about the extent to which our lives are our own-not subject to darker forces….”
‘the rhetoric of sanity and madness has to do with nothing less than what used to be called the ‘meaning of life’
‘both dawkins and atkins are wondering…what it might be like to be sane in the world discovered by modern physics.
It is sane to keep meaninglessness as bay
‘what dawkins doesn’t consider is why we need a sense of purpose, of meaning, of growth and progress, to feel that our lives are worth living.
‘we assume …that it must, by definition, be sane to believe that life is worth living or at the very least that it is sane to want to believe this.’
‘babies have many of the qualities associated with madness…’
Are adults people who are even better at being children than children are?
The pleasure of mastery replaces the pleasure of gratification; or rather, gratification becomes the mastery of appetite, the pride of self-overcoming’
And what he will meet, unlike any other animal, is the exorbitance, the hubris of his appetites.’
Lacan calls desire as ‘that without which our lives feel null and void’
‘sanity then, is not something we are born with, but, in varying degrees, painfully acquire.
“all these myths of development and growth and transformation are ways of dealing with the basic fact that life doesn’t work, at least not in the way we want it to work.”
‘it is sane for the child-and as we shall see, for the adult-to go on wanting while being able to acknowledge and deal with the conflicts that wanting involves.’
‘strung out between romance and pornography it is no longer clear what men and women want to use each other for.’
It is often acknowledged that the best lives, just like the worst lives, are often driven lives.’
‘all the new thinking, like all the old thinking, agrees that there is something catastrophic about being a person. The catastrophe is located in various places: in our being born at all, in our being condemned to death, in our vulnerability as organisms, in our cruel injustices as political animals; in the scarcity of our natural resources, …in our fall, in our hubris.’
‘human sexuality is surprisingly, and sometimes shockingly, diverse in the forms it can take; and because it is human sexuality it is invested with a range of symbolic significances.
‘instead of asking whether everything (or just some things) is sexual, we should be asking, more pragmatically, how would our lives be better, more interesting, more amusing, more exiting-if we describe them as sexual?
The aggressive element in the sexuality of other animals is evident; but it is sadomasochism that differentiates what is human about human sexuality’
‘this is the double bind that the adolescent is initiated into: it is good to be law abiding, but if you abide by the laws, you will never get what you really want.
‘first, parents and children seem to want more from each other than is good for them. And second, the individuals want more from themselves than is good for them.
‘in short, our sexuality seems to make us unreliable to ourselves and others…’
“It is one of the characteristics of people we call insane that they do not have sufficient regard for life.
“there could be a version of sanity….that may be able to include the possibility that life may not be worth living….
“Like any addiction, our addiction to being alive is an attempt to narrow the albeit overwhelming complexity of our minds.”
Is sex, modern adolescents wonder, a good-enough cause; and if not, what, if anything is?
“the big problem about sex, the adolescent discovers, is that it is so pleasurable. And this pleasure is initially revealed in masturbation.”
“in both acts (suicide and masturbation) what is transgressive is their selfishness, the ruthlessness of their satisfactions.
“In both acts what is dispensed with is the need for other people, either permanently or temporarily.”
“it is this violence, and the violent truthfulness they contain, that has made both suicide and masturbation into such shameful, …absurdly horrifying acts.”
“the self-engrossed individual for whom the future is irrelevant-except the most immediate futures, the moment of release-is our negative ideal; is, in fact, our description of the madman.”
“perhaps it is our profoundest solitariness that is our most forbidden pleasure?
“the key question for the adolescent is: what connection can be made, or is worth making, between his or her masturbatory fantasy-romantic or pornographic-and sexual relations with another person?
‘is masturbatory fantasy the route to other people-a kind of trial action in thought-or a way of insulating one’s desires from others? Is it a refuge, or a way into the world? Sane sex, at its most minimal, may be a form of sociability; it is desire as a medium of contact.
“if there can be some notion of sane sex, it would have to refer to forms of sexuality that were not overly harmful.”
“is there such a thing as harmless sex? And if harmless sex is a contradiction in terms-if there is no sexual excitement without an aggressive intention, no sexual exchange without unpredictable and therefore disturbing consequences-erotic life is above all about damage limitation; about getting away with pleasure seeking, and also getting away from it.
‘the principal legacy of childhood that the adolescent has to work on …First, that sexuality always includes the possibility for harm; and second, that what is desired is forbidden.’
‘We don’t take our sanity for granted…we just prefer to locate our natural insanity at two discrete points; in infancy…and adolescence.’
‘one of our innate assumptions is that change is always crisis…’
‘sanity keeps alive the idea of stability…’
‘leaves the adolescent with one persisting question; can you follow a rule…without trying to break it?
‘adolescence is a crisis-a madness one could say-because the adolescent is trying to work out whether life is worth living…is it worth the trouble, is the pleasure worth the pain?’
‘sex and so called sanity don’t go well together because sexual excitement, whatever else it is, is always about the breaking of rules.’
‘at sex we are not dignified, and our limits can never be taken for granted.
‘if some kind of sanity is something we want but secretly do not desire in our erotic lives, it is because sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known.’
‘how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self?
‘so sanity also describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use as protection against catastrophic change.
‘at the most extreme our fantasies about sanity become our refuge from the new...
A sane choice, a choice that makes too much sense, spells fear of the uncertainty of the future.
‘sanity is a story told by survivors. Sanity, if it comes at all, comes afterward.
‘sanity meant finding ways of not knowing about all the things that might drive you insane were you to know of them.”
‘…sanity becomes a repertoire of avoidances-…it is surprisingly difficult for it not to become that. ‘
‘knowing ourselves and being sane may be mutually exclusive’…’these at least have become our modern suspicions’
‘development of a particular sort; development in the direction of revealing the benefits of the interdependence of human beings on each other. It is sane to believe in, and to live as if there are, good things and people in the world that can help us live our lives. It is sane to be capable of and to get pleasure from innovation, spontaneity, responsiveness, and change.
‘what the sane human cannot be is terrorized, desperate, and remote.
What keeps adults sane is proximity to something akin to the mother’s body. Once…god, Virtues…now it is likely to be a satisfying relationship.]
‘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.
‘autism…schizophrenia…speak of a despair about the beneficence of human exchange.’
Sanity in its narrower definitions deprives us of some necessary tools. It allows us neither the full range of reactions…
‘what vitalizes life…what makes life worth living
‘the sane person has found, or been given, a way of loving life that has made the whole question of whether life is loveable seemingly irrelevant.
Depressed…may not want to die…but cannot always find good reasons for wanting to be alive…or indeed, muster an interest in reasons at all.
‘finding life itself-unbearable may, in certain circumstances, be the sane option, the utterly realistic view.
‘a capacity to be depressed means being able to recognize something that is true-that development involves loss and separation, that we hurt people we love and need…depression makes us real, deepens us…
Kleinians…capacity for depression….feature of vision of sanity.
Sanity means loving oneself in the right way, or knowing exactly what about oneself is loveable…
Depression as pathology…illuminates vitality, passion, and engagement
Love of money…will be recognized for what it is….semi-pathological propensities…hand over with shudder to specialist in mental illness.
Keynes believed there had been a moral catastrophe….the mad are ruling the world….
Money, like sexuality, reveals to us something peculiarly disturbing, even pathological, about the nature of our desires.
‘in human beings…appetite can destroy the best things about appetite.
‘,…the primary desire for modern Westerners may simply be to go on desiring…’
‘money gives people an appetite for appetite.
No desiring is far more daunting a prospect than the unavailability of what one desires.’
“money we are reminded, has never stopped people from dying;
‘happiness….is the belated fulfillment of a prehistoric wish. For this reason wealth brings so little happiness’
‘the infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures.
‘the san adult is always smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests.
‘Freud intimates, that there are animals who do not know what they want; and that in all other creatures the continuity of their needs and wants from birth to death is self evident….it would be a kind of madness for needs to be in doubt
‘what the desire for money reveals to Freud is our hatred of happiness; or fear of satisfaction, our phobia of childhood.’
‘our love of material possessions is a hatred of what we love. Money is the betrayal of childhood.’
‘if the enigma of money is referred back to childhood, money was indeed…like shit…much desired but ultimately useless.
‘…were all preoccupied by the ways in which the appetite for money spoiled people’s appetite for each other.’
‘there is not natural state in which we can live, or to which we can return.’
‘designs for a good life, of which the whole notion of sanity must form a part, have been left to the political theorists.’
‘sanities should be elaborated in the way that diagnoses of pathology are; they should be contested like syndromes, debated as to their causes and constitutions and outcomes, exactly as illnesses are.’
‘for whom is this version of sanity?...for anyone who still wants to use the word; anyone who still gets some pleasure, some inspiration
How ambivalent we are about what we want sanity to mean.