“If some kind of sanity is something we want but secretly do not desire in our erotic lives, it is because sanity keeps us in the realm of the already known. Living within our means, living with a realistic sense of our limitations, is at odds with our experience of sexual desire. The love stories that have taught us how to love (such as Romeo and Juliet) are more about risk than complacency, about the ways in which desire takes people out of themselves and into a new life that feels like more life than any they have ever had before. The sanity lost in the madness of love is the sanity of knowing who one is. Only a culture that believes people could and should know themselves would have a use for the idea of sanity, because sanity is nothing if not the capacity and talent for self-recognition. But how does the self-knowing self recognize anything new about the self? To know one’s limits is to limit oneself to the self that one knows. So, sanity also always describes the familiarity we have with ourselves that we use for protection against catastrophic change. If it is part of our sanity to know ourselves, we have to ensure that what we know keeps us sane.” Adam Phillips, Going Sane: Maps of Happiness, Fourth Estate, 2005, p. 117.