When we are greedy, the psychoanalyst Harold Boris writes, we are in a state of mind in which we “wish and hope to have everything all the time”; greed “wants everything, nothing less will do”, and so “it cannot be satisfied”. Appetite, he writes in a useful distinction, is inherently satisfiable. So the excess of appetite we call greed is actually a form of despair. Greed turns up when we lose faith in our appetites, when what we need is not available. In this view it is not that appetite is excessive; it is that our fear of frustration is excessive. Excess is a sign of frustration; we are only excessive wherever there is a frustration we are unaware of, and a fear we cannot bear.
via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.
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