Going Sane [Hardcover]

Adam Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 24, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In classic psychoanalytic style, Phillips strips our lives down to the fundamentals to illustrate the delicate balance between sanity and insanity. Sanity, he notes, "has never been a popular word, or indeed... a condition one might write a book about." Madness, on the other hand, is dramatic and all too visible. We have psychiatrists, neurologists and researchers dedicated to studying and treating madness, but not even a quantifiable definition of saneness. Deftly guiding readers through historical and literary uses of "sane" and "mad," Phillips, a British psychoanalyst (On Flirtation), cites Thomas Carlyle, R.D. Laing, Melanie Klein, D.W. Winnicott and Richard Dawkins, among others, to illustrate the stark absence of a definitive definition of sanity. In Hamlet, for instance, Polonius uses the word "madness" to describe Hamlet's inventiveness and eloquent intelligence: he admires Hamlet's madness. Phillips examines the presence and essence of madness in all aspects of modern life in intriguing and disturbingly frank chapters on the chaos of raising children, the turmoil of adolescence, sexual appetites and the pursuit of wealth. His arguments, both thought provoking and provocative, may affect future definitions of sanity and madness, and readers are left with a fresh awareness of what it really means to be sane.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Hoping to break through our cultural fascination with madness, Phillips summons his readers to the neglected tasks of defining and cultivating sanity. To date, so few have thought seriously about sanity that it usually remains a bland abstraction, recognized only by its absence in the elemental and overwhelming intensity of madness. By drawing on the insights of earlier explorers of the psyche in imaginative and psychological literature, Phillips endows sanity with a truly profound meaning, one rich with the fullest of human possibilities. Only sanity, he argues, dispels the dehumanizing illusions surrounding power and wealth, so renewing the primal desires of childhood and restoring spontaneity and happiness to adulthood. Surprisingly, complete sanity depends less on clear perception of factual reality than it does on imaginative stories of kindness that shape our frankly acknowledged appetites (sexual, acquisitive, intellectual) within a deep awareness of the needs of others. Phillips thus invites his readers not to endorse a psychological orthodoxy giving sanity a fixed character but rather to embark on the unscripted adventure that gives it life. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (February 24, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0241142091
• ISBN-13: 978-0241142097
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,337,762 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking, March 7, 2006

By 

A Strong Poet (Evanston, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Hardcover)

While, on the surface, this book is pretty self-evident and an interesting read, I have to admit that I have found myself thinking about the ideas presented here long after putting down the book. This, to me, is the sign of a surpising and really good book with worthwhile ideas.

The ideas in this book provide the antidote to all the naysayers who claim that psychotherapy and the recovery and new-age movements all need to pathologize the human condition. My problem with all the critics is that they often don't offer any real solution. Phillips' book starts this discussion with an eye for the direction that psychotherapy should be heading.

6 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Is Equal Time Truly Required For "Sanity" Over "Insanity"?, April 4, 2007

By 

Critical Reasoner (Bay Area, ca USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Going Sane: Maps of Happiness (Hardcover)

This had to be the most inane book that I have read in years. The whole point of this unfortunate expenditure of money seems to be that sane people can't get any respect. The entire book is a repetitive tirade over the word sanity, and over sanity itself being given short shrift while the word insanity and the insane get all of the glory (attention).

If you seek a book on sanity and its fragility which matters, read anything by Kay Redfield Jamison (starting with An Unquiet Mind).

There is little more to this book than about one "letter to the editor" worth of thesis. All the rest of this airy, repetitive, double spaced clap trap is just filling. I must assume the one good review above as of the time of my writing, was submitted by someone related to the author for there can be little else to speak in favor of it than personal affinity for it's creator.

As my major in college was in fact psychology, I think it fair to say I have read a few books on the subject. This book, far from being scolarly feels like a very long and tiresome homework assignment handed in by someone who had nothing to say but was up against a deadline.

I donate old books to the Salvation Army but I can't give this to them in good conscience knowing someone else might actually read it.

Terrible!