Attention seeking

"Curiosity never comes with a guarantee."

"Attention seeking is one of the best things we do, even when we have the worst ways of doing it."

"One of the child's fundamental questions is: what is he allowed to be interested in outside the family? The history of our attention, in other words, is one of the stories of our lives."

"I was educated in the culture that is being defended here --a culture of close reading and slow looking, in which the arts were taken to be formative -- which tended to pride itself, as certain kinds of liberalism do, on the ability and freedom to question and cast doubt upon itself; and to concentrate in a way that made recognition of something other than one's self and its abiding preoccupations possible. As though this, in and of itself, guaranteed something; something that could be called the impossibility of fanaticism, or fascism, or certain kinds of egotism; or the imagining of lives not devoted to profiteering; or the possibility of including as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible, with as little demeaning hierarchy as possible (all in the service of personal development, assumed to be the ultimate value). Which at its best it can do and at its worst is a coercive and sure of itself as the people it claims to oppose."

"What would our lives be like without focus? Or without our attention always being prescribed, or described as a means to a known end?."
"psychoanalysis, at its best, contrary to popular prejudice, is the therapy that frees people to lose interest in themselves."

"Dreams are the counter-culture of culture."

"Psychoanalysis is one way of describing what happens to us despite what we want to happen to us; and a way of describing what we are doing despite what we think we are doing."

"Shame, then, is also a sign of self-deception [...] If you want to know what you want to be, pay attention to what makes you feel ashamed of yourself. It is a revelation, so to speak, of your ego-ideal (who you, in the fullest sense, wish to be: how you would like to look). But it is also, by the same token, a revelation of an assumed self-knowledge (someone who had no idea who they were or wanted to be could not feel shame."

"Behaviour that is in conflict with the super-ego, the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft writes, 'evokes guilt, while that which conflicts with the ego-ideal evokes shame.' [...] In the Freudian story, broadly speaking, the super-ego represents the internalised rules of the parents, the ego-ideal the internalised, preferred version of oneself: 'a model to which the subject attempts to conform'. [...] The ego-ideal, that is to say, creates an essential perplexity. Is it safeguarding and sustaining what is best about us -- what we value above all about ourselves, about life -- or is it humiliating us with unattainable ideals? And are we able to talk about the values it promotes, or have we been, as it were, brainwashed or enchanted by our ideals? Are we suffering from our obedience -- our indebtedness -- or for our values? If, for example, we started from the principle that no one owes anyone anything, we could begin to think about what we want to give each other. Are we setting ourselves up to fail, or bringing out the best in ourselves?"

"What Freud is describing is the difference between the kind of attention paid when we know what we want, what we are looking for; and the kind of attention paid when we are finding out what we want, when we don't know beforehand what we want or what we are looking for, only that we are in a state of wanting and seeking."

Adam Phillips, in Attention Seeking