Going Sane by Adam Phillips

Author:Adam Phillips [Phillips, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061873645
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ADOLESCENCE IS a period of transition and transgression. Desiring the parents, the forbidden pleasure of childhood, is replaced by not desiring the parents, the forbidden pleasure of adulthood. Depending on the parents as the primary source of well-being is gradually given up as one becomes both more self-reliant and more or less able to entrust oneself to people outside the family. Sexual desire is the route out of the family, as the adolescent realizes that what she now wants so keenly she cannot get from parents or siblings. It is manifestly a process of separation, but it is experienced as a slow murder, a protracted killing-off. It means that sexual excitement is always linked with a kind of ruthlessness; the parents were the original source of one’s pleasure, now one’s pleasure depends upon their exclusion. The violence, and the violation of pleasure-seeking, is brought home to one; or one must do everything one can to avoid pleasure seeking. The adolescent begins to take on the full consequences of desiring, one of them being that he can never predict the consequences. In taking his chances, in following through, in keeping faith with the coincidence of one’s desire and an object of one’s desire—of something or someone happening to turn up and our being reminded that there was something we wanted—there is a guilty freedom. If it is sane to abide by the rules, if there is a familiar well-being about being good (even though we often describe our sexual desire as a desire for the forbidden), then sex becomes a form of madness. This is the double-bind that the adolescent is initiated into: it is good to be law-abiding, but if you abide by the law, you will never get what you really want. It is sane to sacrifice your desire for your duty, to sacrifice wanting for being wanted.

All our stories about the madness of love are stories of impossible conflict; not merely of people trying to make choices between competing options—between, say, the family and the beloved, like Romeo and Juliet—but of choice suddenly seeming to be the wrong word. We go on doing something that we call making right and wrong choices and then we find ourselves in a situation in which choice doesn’t apply. Tragedy, in which people are traditionally driven mad, is also the name we have given to those situations in which people find they have to come up with something else to do as well as make choices. They have to acknowledge the limits of their willpower. Like the child for whom it could never quite make sense to have to choose between his parents—even if that is what he is also having to do a lot of the time—the tragic hero is finding out where choice applies. It is integral to our picture of sanity that the sane person is able to make choices; just as it is integral to our picture of the lover that nothing plays havoc with rational decision making more than sex.

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