Has anyone read this book, He really brings out some great thinking.
by Adam Phillips
excert from the preface
Even to consider, as I do in this part, how to rear a sane child, or what a sane sexual life would be like: or, perhaps even more behilderingly now, what it would be like to have a sane attitude toward money, is to realize just how much sanity--if it is somethi gwe aim at-- has to be aimed at without a target. Whether, for expample, there is such a thing as sane violence has become perhaps our most pressing political concern. Most people dont want to be insane about such important matters, and yet the alternatives to insanity about these issues are not quite clear. It is one of the contentions of Part Two, and indeed of the book, that sanity is at once something we resist and something we are prone to doubt the existance of. Those of us who dont find madness inspiring are suprisingly short of options; and, at present, there is not much help available. Self-help books aspire to assist us, but they usually take it for granted that in the areas of our lives that matter, we are always capable of making choices. One way or another they all try to restore our confidence in our willpower. But madness, of course, has less reassuring stories to tell about our so-called self-control, about our talent or even our willingness to design our own lives. And sanity seems to tell us very few stories about itself, about what there is about us that can deal with this madness. There are no modern utopian stories that tell us how we might live in a way that would make the fear of madness disappear. In other words, as this part points out, even though it would seem to be against common sense, we know where we are with madness, whereas sanity counfounds us.
It should matter to us, especially now, that sanity is something we cant get excited about; that it so rarely figures among our contemporary aspirations. It is possible that in losing heart about our sanity-in not describing or addressing it---we are losing more than we realize. It means, even at its most minimal, that we are becoming extremely narrow minded about what we want, and what we think we are capable of. We need these conjectures that attempt to blend our wishes with reality to keep us going. But above all we need conjectures that are peruasive in a way that rouses people to counter and complement them. So the final part, "Sane Now" is a stab at sanity; a hope that giving a contemporary account of sanity might invite further competing accounts. We need an alternative now to wealth, happiness, security and long life as the main constituents of a Good LIfe. To think about sanity as a different kind of prosperity, a realistic hope rather than a merely bland or (austerely) grand alternative to madness, is an opportunity, I think, to include in our accounts of a Good Life for ourselves both the unpredictable effect on us of our histories-both what we have experianced ourselves and the illimitable experiance of previous generations-and the urgencies and vulnerablilities of our biological destinies. It would be sane now to work out how we have become the only animals who can't bear themselves; and how, if at all, wemight become the animals who can.