#adam phillips

[milksockets]

A competitive society, one that divides people into winners and losers, breeds unkindness. Human beings, we have said, are ambivalent creatures. Kindness comes naturally to us, but so too does cruelty and aggression. People placed under unremitting pressure become estranged from each other. Like the bullied child who bullies others in turn, individuals coerced by circumstances become coercers. Sympathies contract as openheartedness begins to feel too exposed. Paranoia blossoms as people seek scapegoats for their unhappiness. Such scapegoating is a self-betrayal because it involves sacrificing our kindness.  But this is a price many pay as tribal loyalties, sometimes vicious in their expression, replace wider communal bonds. A culture of hardness and cynicism grows, fed by envious admiration of those who seem to thrive–the rich and famous: our modern priesthood–in this tooth-and-claw environment.

On Kindness - Adam Phillips + Barbara Taylor

[adoniserosapollo]

After dark.... Adam Phillips

[funeral]

In states of absorption, in the solitude of concentration, the other object that disappears is the body. The good-enough environment of the body can be taken for granted; it is most reliably present by virtue of its absence. It does not, as it does in states of desire and illness, insist on its importance; in Maurice Blanchot's words, one "yields to the risk of the absence of time." A fertile solitude is a benign forgetting of the body that takes care of itself; and in this context desire becomes a remembering. In the dream, Freud tells us — that most solitary representation — the body must not be disturbed; we must not wake up to it. A productive solitude, the solitude in which what could never have been anticipated appears, is linked with a quality of attention. The excessive proximity of the object, or of the body as intrusive object, is always a preemptive presence.

Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

[yorgunherakles]

hiçbir şey onu yalnızlığın elinden kurtaramıyor. hiçbir şey ona gerçekmiş gibi gelmiyor.

alain de botton - romantik hareket

[exhaled-spirals]

A trauma, one could say, is a set of bewildering, unconscious instructions.

— Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites

[jacobwren]

“The worst thing we can do to goodness is to be too convinced of our own.” - Adam Phillips, On Wanting to Change

[explore-blog]

How you wait is who you are, and everything depends on your sense of an ending.

Adam Phillips on the psychology of waiting, the art of withstanding absence, and how to get better at missing loved ones

[entheognosis]

The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

Adam Phillips