Going Sane

Adam Phillips takes up a word that psychiatry rarely defines and turns it into a serious subject. Where madness has attracted volumes, sanity tends to pass unexamined, treated as the neutral state left over once disturbance is removed. Phillips argues instead that sanity has a positive content of its own, a way of living that can be described rather than merely assumed, and he pursues it through Shakespeare, Lamb, Dickens and Orwell alongside the clinical thinking of Melanie Klein and her successors.

He separates the merely presentable, socially competent version of sanity from a deeper kind: an honest relation to one's own wants, a place within shared meanings, and a workable self-regard. Sanity, on this account, is not safety but a demanding achievement, easily confused with conformity.

For the clinician, the book supplies a vocabulary for what health might actively contain, and a caution against mistaking adjustment for a life well lived.