On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored
Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life
by Adam Phillips
Completed: January 1, 2020- Other
- 160 pages
- ISBN: 9780674634633
- Goodreads page
The very best introduction to one of my favourite writers in human psychology. Please see my page on Adam Phillips. Some quotes below:
Adulthood, one could say, is when it begins to occur to you that you may not be leading a charmed life.
What do I want? And then, what fantasies of truth do I need to legitimate it?
…the aim of psychoanalysis is not to cure people but to show them that there is nothing wrong with them.
Hell is not other people but one’s need for other people.
The aim of intimacy is to sponsor the solitary unknowability of the True Self.
Children are not oracles, but they ask with persistent regularity the great existential question, “What shall we do now?”
Every adult remembers, among many other things, the great ennui of childhood, and every child’s life is punctuated by spells of boredom: that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains the most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.
It is difficult to enjoy people for whom we have waited too long.
People fall in love at the moment in their lives when they are most terrorized by possibilities. In order to fall in love with someone they must be perceived to be an obstacle, a necessary obstacle.
Truly infectious, kissing may be our most furtive, our most reticent sexual act, the mouth’s elegy to itself.
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