Going Sane - Hardcover

Adam-phillips

3.65

302 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241142091 ISBN 13: 9780241142097

Publisher: Gardners Books, 2005

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Going Sane explores a curious and telling contradiction that goes to the heart of the ways in which we think and talk about ourselves and others: the fact that we are better able to address the subject of madness than that of sanity. For the last three hundred years in the West there have been elaborate descriptions available of what it is to be mad, but no comparable accounts of what it might be to be sane. Now Adam Phillips takes a variety of areas key to our lives, including money, sex, and childhood, and suggests what a sane approach to these might be. And in a wholly original conclusion he gives us a utopian and uplifting vision of what life might be like for a sane person in the modern world.

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About the Author:

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author of ten previous books including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, Darwin's Worms and Houdini's Box. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer and the New York Times, and is General Editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations.

Review:

“Phillips has made psychoanalytic thought livelier and more poetic than ever... One of [his] finest and most broadly appealing books.” (New York Times)

“Phillips offers a detailed description of what sanity can mean today.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Beautifully written...clever and funny, and properly profound...A lovely addition to Phillips’ guides to living a happier life.” (GQ)

“Phillip’s arguments, both thought provoking and provocative, may affect future definitions of sanity and madness.” (Publishers Weekly)

As surely as vanilla is a flavor, sanity is a property, and this book delineates its parameters with considerable erudition.” (Andrew Solomon, author of THE NOONDAY DEMON, winner of the National Book Award)

“Bracing and provocative. Should be enough alone to make whole shelvesful of parenting guides self-destruct.”-- (The Observer)

“Wise and subtle. Going Sane has some superbly suggestive things to say about childhood, depression, autism and schizophrenia.”-- (Irish Times)

“Winningly articulate, enlightening but never patronising, [Adam Phillips] is a born writer...Going Sane is written with elegance and zest.” (Arena)

“Challenging and inspiring ...Going Sane is an indispensable guide to what wisdom means today.” (John Gray, professor of political thought at the London School of Economics)

“Phillips is, as ever, an original and lucid spirit, a buzzing intellectual gadfly in the ointment of our easy answers.” (Daphne Merkin, author of DREAMING OF HITLER: Passions and Provocations)

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