"In the old days -- whenever that was -- there was an internal injunction to be good. Now the injunction is to be happy, or to be enjoying yourself." So says the British psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips in a video interview available on the website of the The New York Times.

What we're continuously being sold is possibilities for pleasure, one way or another -- as though all we want to do is get rid of the pain and increase the pleasure. I think this is a very impoverished view of what a life is, even though every life must involve trying to do something with the pain and having the pleasure. But there's a difference between evacuating pain and frustration, and modifying it. And what we're starved of now is frustration. There isn't a really powerful account of the value of the state of frustration. It's as though we're phobic of frustration, so the moment there is a feeling of frustration it's got to be filled with something. It's a bit like the mother who overfeeds her child. She does that to stop the child from having appetite, because the appetite is so frightening. Now it seems to me there's an attempt to foreclose appetite -- and that means foreclose people's capacity to think about what is really missing in their lives, what they might want, and what they might do about getting it.

You can watch the interview here.