Hungry ghosts

...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...

...Perhaps the bad news that greed brings us is not that we are insatiable animals that need to control themselves, but that we are frustrated animals who can't easily identify what we need, and who are terrified of the experience of frustration...

-- from Insatiable Creatures by Adam Phillips


Image: delicacies from the penis emporium.