Don't Worry be Happy
Going Sane by Adam Phillips
From the FT:

Phillips is a London-based psychoanalyst, a prolific author and a recognised authority on Freud.

Where people go wrong with Freud, says Phillips, is that they imagine his writing is an instruction book on how to live, rather than an inspiration that should evoke ideas of one’s own. He goes on to talk about the difference between hunger and sexual desire. “By virtue of our having once been children,” he says, “our need for parents’ love is always greater than their need for us.” Later in life, this leads inevitably to a gulf between the fantasy and the reality of love. The difference between hunger and sexual appetite is that hunger is a biological need that can be satisfied, whereas love is a desire which cannot - and should not - be fully sated. To be entirely satisfied in the realm of sexual desire would be a catastrophe, according to Phillips. “That is the person we must not find.” None of this can be said to be true of hunger. There is a wriggle of laughter.

Sanity, he says, “is about learning to enjoy conflict”. Relationships “are not the kind of thing one can succeed or fail at, any more than one can succeed or fail at having red hair”. Depression, according to Phillips, “is about managing a lack of desire”. We should excise the word disappointment from our vocabulary, he says - “there is nothing to be disappointed about”. The art of romantic relationships, he reckons, “is to know when one is over”.