Self-knowledge is a decoy - Adam Phillips
In psychoanalysis, I want to free people to lose interest in themselves—not entirely, but enough to be able to be absorbed in other people and things in the world.
Self-knowledge is a decoy. The thing is to have experiences, and the risk is that knowing oneself becomes a way of preempting experience. I think it’s the wrong project.
I’m wary of the way it’s as though the present reality persuades us of the absolute insignificance of what we’re doing. It might take a certain amount of resistance to hold on to the idea these things are worth doing and protecting if we value them. Otherwise, it’s a capitulation. Pessimism is a luxury in a way.
Knowing what we want may be the most offensive thing we can do. What I’m interested in is the ways in which people are prone to deaden themselves, attack their own development, or attack their own capacity for enjoyment.
Certain voices on the page just strike you. We meet millions of people and we read loads of books, but some people stay with us, just like some books stay with us. Clearly there’s very powerful unconscious selective attention going on. We don’t love everybody, and we don’t love all writers. But when we do love a writer, it’s an extraordinary thing, because at that moment something has become very relevant to us. It’s a version of the guru thing, but it isn’t quite that. In a sense we’re finding the guru in ourselves.