The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering

From The Life You Want by Adam Phillips pg 117:

If we wanted a definition of so-called pathology – or our difficulties in living – it may be, in Cioran’s phrase, the murdering of possibility. The murdering of possibility to regulate our suffering, to keep ourselves sufficiently safe. So where Freud’s and Ferenczi’s and Cioran’s question is: how, if at all, can I make my life seem not merely bearable but worth living; how can I justify, or make something I value out of the suffering my life involves?

From pg 118-119:

These questions, in all their apparent rhetorical gravity, may be there … to murder possibility; may indeed be our way of murdering possibility under the cover of pursuing profound questions.

What might we make of ourselves is a call to action, and it confronts us with, or challenges us to ask, what we want rather than what we supposedly are. It makes what we want, and what we want to be … the heart of the matter.

From pg 119:

For the pragmatists, unlike the psychoanalyst, the risk is that we avoid confronting what we want to be, what we might be, what we could be, by telling ourselves what we really are; as though we have delegated what we want to what we have been persuaded we are, or to what we are keen to take ourselves to be.