## Summary Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British psychoanalyst and essayist, once a child psychotherapist at Charing Cross hospital, now perhaps the most literary writer the profession has produced. He has been called the poet of ordinary life: his short, aphoristic books treat boredom, kissing, flirting, frustration and monotony not as problems to be cured but as experiences worth attending to. His interview collection *Monogamy* (1996) is a book of one-paragraph answers about desire and its constraints. ## Monogamy and the forbidden His most quoted thought, and the one that runs through [[Mating in Captivity]]: "If it is the forbidden that is exciting — if desire is fundamentally transgressive — then the monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough. In other words they have to work, if only to keep what is always too available sufficiently illicit to be interesting." Elsewhere in the same book he calls monogamy "a kind of moral nexus, a keyhole through which we can spy on our preoccupations": the arrangement we make about desire reveals more about us than desire itself. ## Frustration as an asset Across the books runs a single reversal: what we experience as an obstacle to satisfaction is often what keeps satisfaction alive. Frustration, boredom and unfulfilled longing are not failures of the good life but its engine, and a self that demands its desires met on schedule has misunderstood what wanting is for. ## In this vault Phillips sits inside the psychoanalytic tradition this vault touches through aesthetics: the same interest in what the mind makes of its own limits. His monogamy material is quoted in [[Mating in Captivity]]. --- `Related:` [[Mating in Captivity]] · [[Esther Perel]] `Concepts:` [[Desire]] · [[Knowledge/Love]] `Knowledge Base:` [[Mating in Captivity]]