Product Description

Volumes have been dedicated to madness, but sanity is rarely mentioned. We can define the mad, but how do we classify the sane? In Going Sane, psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips delves deep into history, philosophy, literature and his own experiences to address questions that we rarely ask about ourselves, taking us on an engrossing journey in which we learn many things – including some of what it takes to be happy in the modern world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #203623 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

About the Author
Adam Phillips is the author of ten previous books including On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, On Flirtation, and Houdini's Box. He reviews regularly for the London Review of Books, the Observer, and The New York Times, makes frequent radio and television appearances, and is General Editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations. He lives in north-west London.

Customer Reviews

I'm sane, me...
In Going Sane, Adam Phillips skilfully marshals a wide cast from literature and the literature of psychology in order to examine the many headed and currently vague notion of sanity.
How is the term used? Why is the term used? Does sanity encompass madness or exclude it?
Opening with a sceptical voice, he considers ideas such as the misuse of the word by The Party in Orwell's 1984 and Laing's consideration of madness as a rational response to circumstances.
Further on, we're challenged to regard the difficulties of an idea of sane sex and the programmed madness of adolescence.
As the book progresses, Phillips asserts his own voice more strongly, finishing with his idea of a sane life; perhaps how a life might be sane, but at least in how the thing might be recognised.
Even while arguing forcefully and eloquently, Phillips still manages to avoid being over prescriptive; his voice is too secular for that. In any case, he insists (in the introduction) that his ideas are there as a challenge.
If you're up for such a challenge and especially if you're interested in where psychology meets philosophy, then this book is for you.

Sanity in a Sea of Madness
This insightful book picks up on the fact that though people talk,and have done for millenia,incessantly about madness as something easily recognisable and identifiable, no one has ever really defined what sanity is. Rather, it is described as the opposite of madness, which is so non-specific as to be useless. Phillips skillfully weaves a narrative as entertaining as it is thought-provoking in charting the idea of sanity and trying to pin its meaning down. In the final chapter Phillips formulates a definition of sanity to which, if we're open-minded enough, we may aspire to.

Despite this, the book is not a self-help manual. It is much more sophisticated and far less didactic. Phillips rigourously backs up his arguments and musings with evidence and ultimately provokes us into thinking about what madness is, whose interests its works in and how we can cope with the conflicting desires we are made of (his thesis is informed by Freud). In essence, Phillips's is a sane and measured voice calling for a realistic definition of sanity that may help us stay sane in an insane world. Overall, a stimulating and rewarding read.

For anyone and everyone
This was my first exposure to Adam Phillips. It took me a while to get into this book and then suddenly it gripped me and didn't let go till I'd finished. Phillips is a brilliant writer and must be a brilliant man. Since reading this I have tried to find as much of his stuff as I can and every time I finish one of his books I go looking for another - he's that good. Not that he is interested in being 'good' as much as he is interested in being kind, dignified, perceptive, honest and thorough. This is a body of work that replaces anti-Freudianisms with a re-positioning of Freudian thinking at the centre of our everyday lives and pre-occupations. Above all Phillips is determined to expose our humiliations and repair them with a language and a way of thinking about ourselves that preserves or perhaps resurrects our dignity as something worth protecting and nurturing. A thought provoking, gentle, passionate and ultimately inspiring book for anyone feeling weary.