Review of going sane: maps of happiness

Reviews the book, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness by Adam Phillips (2005). This book is a kind of psychic travelogue exploring the many different kinds of good life--and pitfalls--to be encountered along the way. It will be of interest to any clinician engaged by a thoughtful examination of what is meant by mental health. The book is divided into three parts, the first offering intellectual and historical background and initial attempts at definition. The last assesses the current psychological climate. The middle section bores deeply into an examination of what the implications of sanity are across several everyday arenas, money and sex being perhaps the most provocative. A preface alerts the reader that this is going to be a multidisciplinary analysis of the subject, contextualized within culture. Phillips establishes early on that although madness has captivated both the professional and the lay imagination for centuries, resulting in often definitive, if oddly subjective and impressionistic ideas of what it means and looks like to be out of one's mind, sanity, by comparison, has failed to enthrall. Sanity, more often than not, remains the desirable choice between the two but functions more as an uneasy default position we don't quite understand than as an accomplishment to be proud of. The security of sanity, Phillips illustrates throughout, is predicated on our not being too curious about it and rests on the positive assertion of the negative, "not mad." Going Sane addresses the question of its meaning and of what use, if any, it has for us today. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).