Many of us are chasing after forbidden thrills while life's finest pleasures are right in front of us, says psychoanalyst Adam Phillips.
In an interview with FSG's Work in Progress, Phillips says that many of life's greatest joys are simple and guilt-free – "enjoying one's coffee in the morning to walking outside on a sunny day."
Yet in his clinical practice, he consistently sees patients struggling "to discover what they really enjoy, having had so much enjoyment foisted upon them growing up." The problem, he notes, isn't a lack of pleasure but our inability to recognize it: "Everyone knows what they should like, what they should attend to, what they should be interested in."
Phillips traces this blindness to Freud's obsession with forbidden desires and the Oedipus complex. His book Unforbidden Pleasures explores how this preoccupation fuels anxiety and procrastination. "I think that procrastination comes out of anxieties generated by the fear of pleasure," he says. Even his own writing practice illustrates the power of unforbidden pleasures — his weekly writing days bring joy precisely because "the writing is not the means to an end of publication or admiration… the real pleasure is in the doing of it."
"Most of our pleasures, most of our real enjoyments, are actually unforbidden pleasures," Phillips says, "but they are partly invisible—making a list of them might almost sound banal."
[Via The Browser]
Previously:
• The Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin
• Ditch the pursuit of happiness and seek out wonder instead
• Adding keyclicks to my Apple laptop increased my happiness
