Going Sane explores a curious and telling contradiction that goes to the heart of the ways in which we think and talk about ourselves and others: the fact that we are better able to address the subject of madness than that of sanity. For the last three hundred years in the West there have been elaborate descriptions available of what it is to be mad, but no comparable accounts of what it might be to be sane.

Now Adam Phillips takes a variety of areas key to our lives, including money, sex, and childhood, and suggests what a sane approach to these might be. And in a wholly original conclusion he gives us a utopian and uplifting vision of what life might be like for a sane person in the modern world.