If you watch the news and remain happy then there is something wrong with you

Anybody in this culture who watches the news and can be happy - then, there's something wrong with them.

"It's very simple. The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It's not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: 'Actually life is wonderful, great - get out there!' That's totally unrealistic and it's bound to fail."

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption."

"Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce," he says. "Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. These are parts of ourselves - that don't want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive." It also, you might notice, suggests humans have a design flaw. In the new essay collection, Side Effects, he offers the Phillipsian paradox that desire is unpredictable as well as insatiable. One might infer that an ironical appreciation of the mystifying human psyche is the best that sane people can manage.

 "What lures us into the future is the renewal of appetite. Having noticed that one's appetite is what vitalises one - Freud talks about this a bit - there could easily be the desire to frustrate oneself. The project might be to keep appetite alive. The problem is that consumer capitalism exploits this because what it does by pretending to offer choice is that it pre-empts you finding out what you want. It's like the way pornography steals people's dreams. It gives you pictures of sex scenarios and so, unlike more imaginative forms of literature, stops you creating your dreams. Instead of having your own sexual fantasies the porn industry does it.

."oubts and vulnerabilities, which is rare in culture that encourages invulnerability.#

No! To be able to speak without censorship is very pleasurable potentially. Wh

So we connive with capitalism until we can't bear it any more and wind up seeking an appointment with Phillips.

This is not like buying a fridge,"

"happiness centres" administering courses of cognitive behavioural therapy are necessary in order to cheer us up and get Britons back to work.

but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you're prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn't, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence."