Equilibrium

On Being Too Much for Ourselves: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Balance and the Necessary Excesses of Life

"Something is always born of excess,"Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary in June of 1945 as she contemplated the value of emotional excess, adding: "Great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them." And yet our compulsive pursuit of balance – take, for instance, the tyrannical notion of work/life balance – is predicated on eradicating "excess," pitting it as a counterpoint rather than a complement to equilibrium and inner wholeness.

That paradoxical relationship is what the celebrated psychoanalyst and writerAdam Phillips examines in On Balance(public library) – a marvelous collection of essays on "the balancing acts that modern societies involve us in," exploring the many myths that bedevil our beliefs about balance and impede our pursuit of it./.../