A Review of Going Sane: Maps of Happiness by Adam Phillips

A map is a metaphor for adventure, intended for a potential traveler equipped, perhaps, with nothing more than an urge for going. 

A map is a metaphor for adventure, intended for a potential traveler equipped, perhaps, with nothing more than an urge for going. From the childish scrawls of a treasure hunt map to the precise accountings of a global positioning system–inspired navigational chart, a map is never a story about boundless possibilities, but always a story about possibilities within bounds. Its primary conceit, of course, lies in the fact that it suggests linear, straightforward relationships of time and distance, articulated by particular biases of topography and scale, whereas the impact of any trip will likely result more from the unforeseen, the unexpected, the surprising. A good map anticipates preferred destinations and the best means by which those destinations might be reached. Hence, the choice of map will shape the nature of the trip and, depending on the fit between it and the traveler, will to a large extent determine the success of the sojourn. Going Sane: Maps of Happiness is a kind of psychic travelogue exploring the many different kinds of good life—and pitfalls—to be encountered along the way. It will be of interest to any clinician engaged by a thoughtful examination of what is meant by mental health.

Adam Phillips is no stranger to foreign types of travel, having for several years traversed diverse fields in his ongoing pursuit of sacred cows and the underscoring of hypocrisy, paradox, and irony in the so-called mental health professions. Drawing extensively on world literature, philosophy, and cultural studies, in addition to psychology and psychiatry, Phillips enjoys asking probing and provocative questions and wondering aloud about the viability of manifold answers. In Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, Phillips (1998) addressed the psychopathology of everyday life, highlighting psychoanalytic staples such as repression, denial, defense, and conflict with poignant and charming illustrations that evince more clinical wisdom than most textbooks on the subject. Similarly, in Terrors and Experts, Phillips (1997) explored the puzzling fact that experts routinely exaggerate their ability to deliver on what they claim to know. In the case of psychoanalysts, Phillips maintains, the problems arise when they begin to believe in psychoanalysis too concretely; when they overreach their ability to discern the unknowable, through their definitive formulations of unconscious material, psychoanalysts tend to confuse, and terrify, both the public and themselves.

One of the most distinguishing hallmarks of Phillips's writing is a privileging of literary perspectivistic analysis; the content of his books and essays, with the exception of his excellent Winnicott (Phillips, 1989) and possibly a few others, always plays second fiddle to the main event of textual criticism. Phillips typically decenters the reader into marveling, along with him, about how interesting, complex, funny, simple, ecstatic, and tragic it all can be. Going Sane is very much in this vein, offering the reader many rewards in the process of not reaching the elusive destination of the book's title, but perhaps growing a bit closer, here and there, via the medium of meditative discursive analysis. This decentering is so enjoyable, in fact, that following Phillips's free associations, musings, and inversions left me feeling more taken with the journey than with any of the particular stops on the itinerary. But perhaps this is just Phillips's point: that sanity is found more often in the temerity to ask and wonder than in the pressure to know and define.

Leading us down dialectic paths and exegetic switchbacks as he navigates this compelling and often consternating terrain, Phillips encourages readers to question their sanity in the process of never fully realizing it, an intriguing invitation made more pleasurable than dangerous by his own clear and intrepid involvement in the process. The book is divided into three parts, the first offering intellectual and historical background and initial attempts at definition. The last assesses the current psychological climate. The middle section bores deeply into an examination of what the implications of sanity are across several everyday arenas, money and sex being perhaps the most provocative. A preface alerts the reader that this is going to be a multidisciplinary analysis of the subject, contextualized within culture.

Phillips establishes early on that although madness has captivated both the professional and the lay imagination for centuries, resulting in often definitive, if oddly subjective and impressionistic ideas of what it means and looks like to be out of one's mind, sanity, by comparison, has failed to enthrall. Sanity, more often than not, remains the desirable choice between the two but functions more as an uneasy default position we don't quite understand than as an accomplishment to be proud of. The security of sanity, Phillips illustrates throughout, is predicated on our not being too curious about it and rests on the positive assertion of the negative, “not mad.” Going Sane addresses the question of its meaning and of what use, if any, it has for us today.

In his various attempts at defining sanity through the ages, Phillips makes the trenchant observation that in looking for sanity, you can never approach it directly, for it fractures easily on close scrutiny:

Whether it is an object of desire, something one could devote one's life to achieving, something one could feel passionate about, or whether, more modestly, it may just be one of our better states of mind—like a voice inside us, fleeting but occasionally available for comment—sanity may not be as easy as we might wish to recognize or to agree upon….If it is something we aim at—[it] has to be aimed at without a target. (pp. xviii–xix)

In his fascinating review of the evolution of the term, Phillips turns to literature as well as the social sciences for guidance. Starting with Shakespeare's Hamlet, we learn that madness, although unsettling, impresses through language. Polonius, who thinks Hamlet mad because of his unusual use of words, wonders what access the Dane may have to uncommon wisdom. A brief analysis of this aspect of the play sets the backdrop against which much of the confusion and mystery surrounding the concept of sanity is examined.

There are common conundrums here that we will become familiar with. Madness can be associated with both unconventional truth telling, and with the intention to mislead. The mad speak in ways we don't understand, but that makes us think that they know something we don't know. They can sound unworldly and unusually intelligent at the same time. And the sane, by the same token, seem more reasonable about their wants, more straightforwardly honest. The mad lack a sense of community, isolated by the pregnant ambiguities of their speech; the sane seem to lack a certain complexity, but live at relative ease in a commonwealth of shared understandings. The sane can, in the fullest sense, get on with people; the mad are difficult. (pp. 7–8)

In Part 1, Phillips provides a wide lens through which we are invited to consider the multiple separate and entwined meanings of sanity and madness. By opening up the concept of sanity to a wider group than mental health professionals, Phillips asks the reader to consider that the experts may be missing something. One could wonder, indeed, if trusting a concept as central as sanity to any one group, professional or otherwise, would be a sane decision. The idea that a paucity of perspectives is dangerous and less valuable than a plentitude is at the heart of Phillips's bias of dialectical understanding, as the following quote attests:

Sanity is clearly a word we use freely so long as we don't have to define it. In the rather one-sided language of the mental health professions it is often tacitly assumed that sanity must be everything that madness is not. That we should be able to straight forwardly deduce a picture of sanity from any given picture of madness (tell me what it is for something to go wrong and I can tell you what it is for something to be going right). But if, say, it is mad behavior to be deluded, to see things that are consensually agreed not to be there, is it then sane behavior to see only things that are consensually there? If it is mad to hear voices, what is it then sane to hear? (pp. 32–33)

For Phillips, human experience consists always of an ongoing relationship, a dialectical tension, if you will, between opposite and associative states of awareness. The need we feel to isolate, categorize, exclude, and split apart our experience is in service of avoiding dreaded feelings; we want to believe that the simpler thing is the better and safer thing; that somehow at our core we feel persecuted by possibilities, and our freedom beckons in the guise of fewer choices. Common sense would somehow argue that underneath it all we have access to a consensual solution, and yet,

Common sense is increasingly something we can no longer agree about. Indeed, what, if anything, we have in common with each other, and what we can do to keep ourselves sufficiently sane, have become our abiding contemporary preoccupations. Whether multiculturalism is compatible with social cohesion; whether we can guarantee our security only by sacrificing our freedoms: these are our political considerations now. On the world stage it is not the sanity of politicians we are most struck by. (pp. 61–62)

Sex is a ripe arena in which to consider what we mean by sanity, for in navigating our sexual impulses within contexts of competing social contracts, we often feel overwhelmed when faced with having to learn how to be satisfied while obeying the rules. A certain amount of sexual fulfillment is typically necessary for happiness, and yet few are happy with a mere sufficiency. Wanting more than one needs, and something different than what is offered, can severely test one's sanity.

Phillips argues that sane sex is essentially a misnomer, the greatest developmental hurdle for the adolescent in that the need to obey the rules and the need for sexual satisfaction are mutually exclusive:

The adolescent, in other words, is being trained—encouraged, educated, and manipulated—to be a sane, sexually desiring adult. But the sane bit is about choice making, and the sex bit is about the impossibility of choice making. Coming to terms with this would drive anyone mad. (p. 99)

Security and the satisfaction of desire become forced-choice options:

Sane sex is a contradiction in terms, because the penumbra of our associations to the word “sane” conjure up—as a kind of tacit knowledge everywhere consented to but nowhere agreed upon—a dignified apprehension of limits. At sex we are not dignified; and our limits can never be taken for granted. (pp. 116–117)

At the end of this story on how to get to the elusive state of sanity, Phillips tells us that, although there are no definite answers, no supportable stances outside of changing contexts, there are some guidelines, like chalk-marked trees in the forest, to help us find our way. Chief among these is the necessity of holding multiple points of view as long as possible; of knowing that we never really know, that the best-intentioned relationships are only experiments, and that we are both different from and similar to everyone else. That the best maps of happiness are the ones laid on top of one another, shuffled regularly, and consulted together, and used, perhaps, for nothing more than inspiration. Speaking of the contemporary sane person, Phillip says,

His new acknowledgement is that his needs—the ones he has learned that he has and the unsuspected ones that could turn up or return at any moment—will often be in conflict with each other; and will usually create conflict between himself and others. Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency, and redemption. (p.184)