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[malabar]

Going Sane explores the contradiction that we are better able to address the subject of madness than that of sanity. For the last three hundred years in the West, there have been elaborate descriptions available of what it is to be mad, but no comparable accounts of what it might be to be sane. Phillips discusses money, sex, and childhood, and suggests what sane approaches to these might look like.

What I found most interesting in this book was the discussion of how human desire can be so mixed up with the forbidden and the struggle to satisfy enough of the desire to make life worth living without scaring the crap out of ourselves (sanity being, among other things, the successful navigation of these troubled waters). I'm sure a lot of this can be attributed to the authorial bias toward Freudian psychoanalytic theory, but it was an interesting perspective for me.

Another key point I found intriguing was the definition of sanity as the ability not to shun all forms of madness, but the capacity to pick up and use the tools of insanity when needed and put them down again at will. This is more or less the definition of the shaman's role: someone who can go to to far-off dimensions, get useful information, and return to share it with the tribe.

I found myself scribbling notes as I read, unwilling to trust my memory with some of Phillips's insights. They aren't precepts to rule a life, but they certainly are thought-provoking. Highly recommended.