Missing Out
On the unlived lives we imagine we are missing, and living with frustration.
We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives we are unable to lead.
Adam Phillips takes up the lives people imagine running alongside the ones they lead, the unlived life of the road not taken, and asks what this constant companion does to the life that is actually lived. He treats frustration not as a problem to be solved but as the ground on which wanting stands, arguing that our fantasies of what we are missing quietly govern what we allow ourselves to have.
Working through Shakespeare, Freud and everyday disappointment, Phillips questions the wish to be understood and the premature satisfactions of getting what we think we want. For the clinician, the book reopens the place of frustration, satisfaction and not-having in a life, and offers a way of listening to the patient who is haunted by an elsewhere. It was first published in 2012.
About the author
Adam Phillips
Adam Phillips (born 1954) is a British psychoanalyst and essayist working within the psychoanalytic tradition. He served as principal child psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital in London and is general editor of the Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud. A regular contributor to the London Review of Books, he has written many books, among them On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane, and Becoming Freud, and is known for essays that bring psychoanalytic thinking to a general readership.
Details
- 2012
- Hamish Hamilton
- Hamish Hamilton
- 224
- 9780241143872