{"id":10202,"date":"2025-03-08T15:01:44","date_gmt":"2025-03-08T19:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/adam-phillips-on-the-danger-of-treating-ourselves-as-pathological-patients-in-need-of-a-cure-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-03-08T15:01:44","modified_gmt":"2025-03-08T19:01:44","slug":"adam-phillips-on-the-danger-of-treating-ourselves-as-pathological-patients-in-need-of-a-cure-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/adam-phillips-on-the-danger-of-treating-ourselves-as-pathological-patients-in-need-of-a-cure-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Adam Phillips on the Danger of Treating Ourselves as Pathological Patients in Need of a Cure \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

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\"Against<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cI did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it,\u201d the British psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote under a pseudonym in her superb century-old field guide to the art of knowing what you really want<\/a> \u2014 that most difficult, most rewarding among the arts of living. It is hard to know what we want because, disquieted daily by \u201cthis sadness of never understanding ourselves,\u201d<\/a> it is hard to know who we are. To want anything is to acknowledge a lack, a gap between the real and the ideal, between the life we have and the life we desire, which is fundamentally a gap between who we are and who we wish to be. <\/p>\n

Pulsating beneath our lives is the most hautning, most universal question: \u201cWhy are we not better than we are?\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

In our yearning for an answer, for a bridge between the real self and the ideal self, we have invented religion and psychotherapy, we have turned to shamans and self-help gurus, we have fasted and prayed, filled out personality tests and followed autosuggestion protocols. But while a certain level of restlessness is necessary to our creative vitality \u2014 that \u201cdivine dissatisfaction\u201d<\/a> out of which art is born \u2014 living with a sense of perpetual deficiency petrifies the possible in us. For, as Kurt Vonnegut knew<\/a>, there is no greater enemy to happienss than the sense of not enough, the feeling that we need to have more or be more in order to live with a fullness of being and an inner completeness. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>. Available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as a greeting card<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips offers an antidote to our civilizational cult of self-improvement in his slender, potent book On Getting Better<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>).<\/p>\n

We are trapped, he observes, by our frame of reference:<\/p>\n

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If you have a broken leg, or a fever, you know what is to be aimed for; if you have a broken heart or a sense of shame, it is not quite so clear\u2026 Patients come to psychoanalysis with an idea of cure because, historically, they have been to medical doctors, and before that they have been to religious healers. A culture that believes in cure is living in the fallout, in the aftermath, of religious cultures of redemption.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Self-improvement can be self-sabotage. Too knowing; too knowing of the future. A distraction, a refuge from one\u2019s personal vision.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He considers the paradox at the crux of our zeal for self-improvement:<\/p>\n

\n

We can\u2019t imagine our lives without the wish to improve them, without the progress myths that inform so much of what we do, and of what we want (we don\u2019t tend to think of ourselves as wanting to be what we are already). Whether we call it ambition, or aspiration, or just desire, what we want and what we want to be is always our primary preoccupation, but it is always set in the future, as though what could be \u2014 our better life, our better selves \u2014 lures us on. As though it is the better future that makes our lives worth living; as though it is hope that we most want.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The problem with an idealized future is that every ideal is not only a form of wanting but a form of presumed knowledge \u2014 about what is optimal and desirable, about the vector of change \u2014 and yet the future is fundamentally unknowable. (This is why the things we most ardently desire are the most transformative, but we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation<\/a>.) Phillips writes:<\/p>\n

\n

One cannot know the consequences of one\u2019s wanting, because one can\u2019t know the future except as an assumed replication of the past\u2026 It is almost certain that we won\u2019t or can\u2019t get what we want, partly because, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we are largely unconscious, unaware, of what we want.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/a>
Art by Violeta L\u00f3piz for At the Drop of a Cat<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With an eye to a word so fashionable that we have hollowed it of meaning by overuse and mususe, by making it a catchall for anything that challenges and disquiets us \u2014 trauma<\/em> \u2014 he adds:<\/p>\n

\n

There is, after all, no life without trauma; indeed, the word misleadingly makes us think of something being interrupted, rather than of something integral, something essential to our lives. So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us, and on what we make of what we do; on our being able to metabolize or digest our experience; on our capacity or willingness to transform our experience rather than be merely victimized by it. When getting better doesn\u2019t only mean getting safer, it means being able to risk feeling more alive, to risk taking risks, to risk learning and not learning from experience.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

Learning from experience means learning what your experience can\u2019t teach you \u2014 the nature and quality of future experience.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Those soul-broadening, life-deepening risks, those blessed unknowns of the future fometing the capacity for self-surprise that keeps us from ossifying, are precisely what Mario Benedetti placed at the center of his stunning poem \u201cDo Not Spare Yourself.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Complement with pioneering psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott \u2014 whose intellectual lineage Phillips continues \u2014 on the qualities of a healthy mind<\/a>, then revisit Phillips on the paradoxes of transformation<\/a> and the countercultural courage of changing your mind<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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