#adam phillips

[caintooth]

—

The Last Days of Judas Iscariot by Stephen Adly Guirgis / Hannibal, s2ep13 / Judas’ Gift by Adam Phillips / The Kiss of Judas Iscariot by Ignazio Jacometti / Hannibal, s3ep0

#the last days of judas iscariot #hannibal nbc #stephen adly guirgis #judas’ gift #adam phillips #the kiss of judas iscariot #judas iscariot #judas #judas x jesus #ignazio jacometti #diary #web weaving #comparatives #hannigram #hannibal lecter #will graham #bedelia du maurier

[milksockets]

One's personal history, whatever else it is, is a history of one's obedience. For everyone, the retrospective question is always, what did I consent to, and what did I have to submit to, as a child, that I didn't actually agree with? Whether one wants to do what one is told to do--that is, whether one wants what one is told to want--and what we can do with and about this question, are the moral starting points. All moral questions are questions of obedience.

Unforbidden Pleasures - Adam Phillips

#quote #adam phillips

[poeticque]

Everything depends on what the individual can make of being betrayed. And in order to be betrayed you need – you might have to find, to recruit, to seduce – a betrayer... Betrayal is an uncanny form of intimacy.

Judas’ Gift, by Adam Phillips. 

#lit #quotes #words #betrayal #adam phillips #intimacy #attachment #judas's gift

[androscoggintoboggan]

Adam Phillips.

#adam phillips

[obsessedmeninjeans]

Adam Phillips by Cal McDougall

#adam phillips #cal mcdougall

[jacobwren]

We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called selves. Nothing makes us more critical – more suspicious or appalled or even mildly amused – than the suggestion that we should drop all this relentless criticism, that we should be less impressed by it and start really loving ourselves. But the self-critical part of ourselves, the part that Freud calls the super-ego, has some striking deficiencies: it is remarkably narrow-minded; it has an unusually impoverished vocabulary; and it is, like all propagandists, relentlessly repetitive. It is cruelly intimidating – Lacan writes of ‘the obscene super-ego’ – and it never brings us any news about ourselves. There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar; a stuck record, as we say, but in both senses – the super-ego is reiterative. It is the stuck record of the past (‘something there badly not wrong’, Beckett’s line from Worstward Ho, is exactly what it must not say) and it insists on diminishing us. It is, in short, unimaginative; both about morality, and about ourselves. Were we to meet this figure socially, this accusatory character, this internal critic, this unrelenting fault-finder, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him, that he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout, of some catastrophe. And we would be right.

Adam Phillips, Unforbidden Pleasures

#adam phillips

[forcuriousguys]

Adam Phillips in white CKs

#white #undergear #calvin klein #adam phillips #hairy abs #happy trail #hairy chest

[yorgunherakles]

insan bütün hayatını biriyle yan yana geçirebilir, o insan kucağında ölebilir, ama son anda bile, onun neyi yapıp yapmayacağından emin olmayabilir, gerçek arzularından bile emin olmayabilir, o arzularını yeterince tatmin edip etmediğini, hayatı boyunca bazı özlemlerle yaşayıp yaşamadığını bilemeyebilir.

javier marias - yarınki yüzün

#javier marias #yarınki yüzün #kitap #edebiyat #blogger #kitaplar #felsefe #blog #kitap kurdu #şiir #kitaplık #charles bukowski #orhan pamuk #tutunamayanlar #tehlikeli oyunlar #adam phillips #john berger #selim ileri #selçuk baran #nuri bilge ceylan #zeki demirkubuz #tek eşlilik

[loneberry]

There are always two perhaps obviously striking things about suicide (though that they are obvious should also give us pause): it is always profoundly disturbing, and it makes everyone who knows the person obsessed by causality, by the question of how and why it could have happened, and what anyone could have done to prevent it (Winnicott said that whenever someone told him they wanted to kill themselves, he never tried to dissuade them, he just tried to ensure they were doing it for the right reasons). It seems almost unintelligible, or perhaps someone’s failure, that a person could do such a thing, as though the ultimate wish to exempt oneself – to expel oneself, to leave oneself out of one’s own project – is a doubt, or a violence, too far. We feel that life itself is something that can’t be given up, or given up on (or that life had to be made sacred to keep it valuable). And it is never clear to us, as the inheritors of a sacred cosmos, whether suicide is a triumph of individual agency, or the triumph of something other than this supposed agency (something, say, only a devil could tempt one with); it is never clear to us whether suicide is what we call a choice, or the abrogation of choice – the choice, among other things, to give up choosing. We are left wondering what, if anything, could predispose someone to suicide.

—Adam Phillips, “On Giving Up”

#adam phillips #suicide #psychoanalysis #death #giving up #failure #quitting

[caintooth]

“You can do a lot of things with betrayal, but you can’t undo it. It feels irredeemable. To betray is to create a situation that there is no going back from.

If betrayal is one of the ways, or even the way, in which we change our lives, perhaps we should talk not only of the fear of being betrayed, but of the wish, the willingness to be betrayed, and to betray. And then we would be talking of consciously or unconsciously engineering our own betrayal, and looking for people (or things) we can betray. We would be talking of betrayal as a transformational act; we might even talk of it as an object of desire and start noticing how we seek it.”

from Judas’ Gift, by Adam Phillips.

(emphasis my own.)

#judas’ gift #judas #judas iscariot #adam phillips #betrayal #diary #change #desire #im gonna put the funniest and most true tags possible now: #hannigram #hannibal nbc

[milksockets]

The compliant child runs the risk of becoming a rebel; the non-compliant child runs the risk of wanting a permanent state of revolution, of more or less continual self-overcoming. The compliant child, in this very modern story, will crave ritual and routine; the non-compliant child will want nothing but the shock of the new (anger is hope: hope that things can be different; that frustration can be modified). The non-compliant child is always wanting to extend her repertoire; the compliant child is wanting more of the same.

Unforbidden Pleasures - Adam Phillips

#quote #adam phillips

[poeticque]

We have to bear something simple but significant in mind: that in betraying someone (or something) one is protecting someone (or something) else.

Judas’ Gift, by Adam Phillips. 

And that someone or something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value. (cont.)

#lit #quotes #words #betrayal #adam phillips #judas's gift #desire #love #relational #attachment

[androscoggintoboggan]

Adam Philips.

#adam phillips

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[William Blake :: Song of Loss]

* * * * *

Good Grief

by Adam Phillips

From a symposium on the topic of loss, which was published in the Spring 2023 issue of The Threepenny Review.

The cult of loss has many enthusiastic members. And as with any cult, critics tend to be demonized or ignored, if only for using the word “cult” about a group of committed, like-minded people. Emerson was never celebrated, or even really engaged with, for writing, after his son’s death, “The only thing grief has taught me is to know how shallow it is.”

It can seem astoundingly callous not to take seriously the scale of loss. It is as though transience and deprivation define us, and so anyone challenging our being bewitched by the idea of loss, our wish to apply it everywhere, our wish to use it to explain everything (aging as the loss of youth, illness as the loss of health, madness as the loss of sanity, evil as the absence of good, and so on), is likely to be deemed merely out of touch with reality, or needlessly provocative. Mourning seems to be our universal religion.

But if we are essentially elegiac creatures—obsessed only with what we have lost, or can or will lose—we should note that no other animal seems to be similarly stricken. Clearly animals feel loss: we witness something happening to them when they are sick, or when a fellow creature dies. But they seem to live as though survival is their thing, rather than loss.

It is language, acculturation, that has given us loss and its elaboration. Just to use a word is to acknowledge the absence of its referent, as though language itself makes loss our theme and medium. Words are always a mourning, however blithe, for what they represent. And by the same token, language as our second nature makes it difficult to work out what loss may be a way of thinking about—other, that is, than loss itself. It is not obvious what we are using the idea and the experience of loss to do for ourselves, and whether this essential perplexity gets us the lives we want. What else could a good or viable life be preoccupied with? What might we be interested in, if we were not so interested in loss? Can loss be redescribed in any genuinely useful way, or is it simply our fate as mortal, dependent, and occasionally rational animals to see everything we do as somehow organized around loss, or the anticipation of it?

When Robert Hass began his great poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” with the lines “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking,” it seemed at once incontestable but also strangely dismaying. All experiment and curiosity and unpredictability and improvisation and complexity collapse in the wake of loss. This, we might think, is essentialism at its most extreme. This is what it is like to be the emperor of one idea. This is what it is like to live in a cult.

Childhood, for Freud, was primarily, if not exclusively, an initiation into loss. What is called development is what we can make out of loss. So when Freud famously described, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, what became known as the fort/da game of his grandson—in which the child threw a wooden toy on a string away from himself and then retrieved it, uttering as he did so infantile versions of “Fort!” (gone) and “Da!” (there)—Freud took it that the game was a way of mastering his mother’s absences, by repeating the traumatic experience symbolically. What he has had to suffer passively, he made into a game that he could actively control. This, Freud suggested, is what we all do. This is even how culture works for us, what culture is for—to master loss. Whether or not the child is mastering loss, he has certainly redescribed his experience of his mother’s inevitable intermittent absences. Is it now a loss or a game?

Loss may be the very thing we need to find ways of transforming, to prompt our inventiveness. We might become less terrorized by it, and so less obsessed and impressed by it. We might then be able to understand and use Picasso’s wonderful boast, “I do not seek, I find.” Finding would be the point, and not losing. Loss would no longer be, as it were, an end in itself. When loss is not catastrophic loss, it is a form of stage fright.

[from Harpers]

#Harpers Magazine #loss #articles #grief #Adam Phillips #psychology

[jacobwren]

"Adam Phillips credits reading Winnicott’s book Playing and Reality with inspiring him to become a child psychoanalyst. And it was from Winnicott that he developed the central importance of dependence and relationships. “In Freud’s view man is divided and driven, by the contradictions of his desire, into frustrating involvement with others,” Phillips writes in his first book. “In Winnicott man can only find himself in relation with others, and in the independence gained through acknowledgement of dependence. For Freud, in short, man was the ambivalent animal; for Winnicott he would be the dependent animal . . .” It might be more accurate to say that, for Winnicott (and for Phillips), man is the animal who is ambivalent about his dependence. We need other people, and we resent that about them because it means they can frustrate our desires—and they do. Our dependence, then, is often something we would like to “give up,” or at least disavow, but it is also, definitionally, the condition of not being able to. Worse still: to deny our helplessness is to forego the possibility of being satisfied." - Sam Adler-Bell, Good Enough: Psychoanalysis learns to love letting go

#sam adler-bell #adam phillips #d.w. winnicott

[uselessgirldotcom]

#on flirtation #adam phillips