Adam Phillips (psychologist) Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Monogamy is a way of getting the versions of ourselves down to the minimum.

Adam Phillips
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.

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

Adam Phillips
All of us may be surrealists in our dreams, but in our worries we are incorrigibly bourgeois.

Adam Phillips
The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be our most violent form of nostalgia.

Adam Phillips
Believing in religion is like believing that adulthood is the solution to childhood.

Adam Phillips
People change, but there really are limits. One thing you discover in psychoanalytic treatment is the limits of what you can change about yourself or your life. We are children for a very long time.

Adam Phillips
Lovers, of course, are notoriously frantic epistemologists, second only to paranoiacs (and analysts) as readers of signs and wonders.

Adam Phillips
The whole notion of sanity may be an attempt to medicalize morality - to speak of the good in the language of health: to make us more accurate, more scientific in our wanting - but by the same token it becomes a form of moral blackmail. It is as if to say: if these are not valued - if these forms of wanting and feeling and speaking and doing - are not cultivated and encouraged and rewarded in the child, then the child will be mad.

Adam Phillips
The vocabulary of one's self-criticism is so impoverished and clichéd. We are at our most stupid in our self-hatred.

Adam Phillips
Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.

Adam Phillips
What would our lives be like if we took earthworms seriously, took the ground under our feet rather than the skies high above our heads, as the place to look, as well, eventually, as the place to be? It is as though we have been pointed in the wrong direction.

Adam Phillips