On Giving Up

On Giving Up collects essays by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the many things people relinquish: appetites, ambitions, hopes, and at the extreme, the wish to go on living. Phillips separates giving something up, a renunciation made in the service of change, from giving up altogether, the collapse of belief that change is possible. Across the chapters he reads sacrifice, exclusion, nihilism and censorship as everyday acts with a hidden logic, drawing on Freud, Lacan, Marion Milner and a wide range of literary writers.

For the clinician, the book offers a vocabulary for the surrenders that surface in the consulting room. Phillips attends to Milner's distinction between focused and expansive attention, and to the ambivalence in what a patient decides to abandon. Several chapters began as separately published essays, and the writing moves by association rather than argument, holding a question open rather than settling it.