Adam Phillips on the mad

“The mad are people we can’t understand and who do things that are too unacceptable; and so they are people we may be, or feel ourselves to be, endangered by. They expose what an enormous cultural investment we have in understanding people; madness, we could almost say, is what makes us idealize understanding each other, and makes us want to believe that we do.” Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012, p. 187.