Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell’s poem, that ‘The ways we miss our lives is life’, we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.

We discover these unlived lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious (and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us. And, of course, in our daily frustrations. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage; though at its best it lures us into the future, but without letting us wonder

We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.

In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to be done: first, ideally, we are made to feel special; then we are expected to enjoy a world in which we are not.

‘What makes my life worth living for?’ ‘What are the pleasures without which I cannot live?’ It is among the contentions of this book that our unlived lives – the lives we live in fantasy, the wished-for lives – are often more important to us than our so-called lived lives, and that we can’t (in both senses) imagine ourselves without them; that they are an essential part of the ways in which we answer Freud’s questions. And it is not incidental to this that in our unlived lives we are rather more transgressive than we tend to be in our lived lives.

There is a gap between what we want and what we can have, and that gap, Camus says, is our link, our connection, to the world (the absurdity, we might say, is our assumption that the world was made for us; even if our parents more or less suited us, the world probably won’t).

Missing out on one experience we have another one. And then the comparisons are made. We choose by exclusion. The right choice is the one that makes us lose interest in the alternatives; but we can never know beforehand which the right choice will be. We never know if one frustration will lead to another.

But the worst thing we can be frustrated of is frustration itself; to be deprived of frustration is to be deprived of the possibilities of satisfaction.

The pragmatist would say that the art of life is in rendering incompatible wants compatible; redescribing them such that they are no longer mutually exclusive

(frustration is optimistic in the sense that it believes that what is wanted is available, so we might talk about frustration as a form of faith).

We would rather destroy everything than let other people change us, so strong is our memory of how changed we were at the very beginning of our lives by certain other people; people who could change our misery into bliss, as if by magic, and which we were unable to do for ourselves (all we could do was signal our distress and hope someone got the point).

we are always looking for an alternative to changing, to being, as he puts it, exposed to change.

So it is tempting to say that we can be at our most self-deceiving in states of frustration; as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction).

that if someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration.

The demand for love is always a doubt about love; and all doubt begins as a doubt about love.

Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want.

What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing – nothing comes of nothing – but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies. But one thing is very noticeable in this basic story; that however much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them.

presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel ...

that the point of finding out what is missing is to recover it;

The ideal person in our minds becomes a refuge from realer exchanges with realer people.

the individual’s fate is bound up with

what he can make out of frustration.

It is the failure of the anticipated satisfaction, its non-arrival once fantasized, that is crucial; it is disillusionment that leads the desiring individual to reality.

So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works.

But the quest for satisfaction begins and ends with a frustration; it is prompted by frustration, by the dawning of need, and it ends with the frustration of never getting exactly what one wanted. How could we ever be anything other than permanently enraged?

if we can’t think our frustrations – figure them out, think them through, phrase them – we can’t seek our satisfactions. We will have, as they say, no idea what they are.

You can’t have a desire without an inspiring sense of lack. What we do to our frustration to make it bearable – evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on – takes the sting out of its tail.

People become real to us by frustrating us; if they don’t frustrate us they

are merely figures of fantasy. The story says something like: if other people frustrate us the right amount, they become real to us, that is, people with whom we can exchange something; if they frustrate us too much, they become too real, that is, persecutory, people we have to do harm to; if they frustrate us too little, they become idealized, imaginary characters, the people of our wishes; if they frustrate us too much, they become demonized, the people of our nightmares. And these, we might say, are two ways of murdering the world: making it impotent or making it unreal.

And yet Freud, followed, among others, by Bion, is asking us to imagine something that is seemingly wildly improbable: that there can be only unrealistic wanting, but that unrealistic wanting can be satisfied only by realistic satisfactions; everything else being frustration in disguise, rage and vengefulness, what Cavell calls the murdering of the world. We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it.

To recognize our

desire for what it is – as both dependent on others, and forbidden and therefore transgressive – reveals us as too unacceptable to ourselves, too conflicted, too endangered; it puts us, quite literally, at odds with ourselves.

anxiety’. Only the dialectic, the see-saw, between recognition and misrecognition makes things bearable; were we to straightforwardly recognize the essential aspects of ourselves, it is suggested, we would not be able to bear the anxiety.

We are, in actuality, something we don’t have the wherewithal to recognize.

The only phobia is the phobia of self-knowledge.

We may not know exactly what is lacking in our lives, but we do know the experience of there being something lacking, something

If it had to be formulated, in brief, we could say that the man or woman of your dreams is the person who both gets you and doesn’t get you in the way you prefer to be got. That is to say, someone who doesn’t treat you only as their favourite joke.

that anxiety is a signal of the ego, warning of danger or trauma; ‘danger’ here is any feeling, impulse or action that could threaten the primary bond with caretakers. In other words, any feeling, impulse or action that results in separation from a loved one, or the loss of his or her love, is experienced as threatening, evokes anxiety, and is consequently avoided, giving rise to intrapsychic conflict between expressive and repressive forces within the psyche.

The question is not simply, why am I doing this? It is also the less metaphysical question – the question that begins in the family – who am I doing this for, and what, in doing this, am I doing for them?

We have been taught to wish for it, but the wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to our grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers off the hook for their not meeting our every need. Wanting to be understood, as adults, can be, among many other things, our most violent form of nostalgia.

If you don’t want intelligibility, what do you want instead?

We make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense.

Proust wants to persuade us, that this wish to know is more pernicious, less clueless; that what one wants to know about the other, unconsciously, is what will cure us of our desire for them.

What I am interested in is what might be discovered, or found, or experienced, in the not getting it that might be of value (how, for example, might one write about a poem if one made no attempt to explain it?).

What both the so-called patient and the so-called analyst are so often struck by in the process of psychoanalysis is how so much of what seems to be true makes absolutely no predictable difference. Or, more exactly, that the difference that knowing can make is itself unknowable; that what you can discover about your own desire, about the history of your desiring, tells you nothing certain about your future proclivities.

When we are talking about getting away with something we are talking about the dizzying possibility of not being punished for getting what we think we want (what Sartre called ‘the vertigo of freedom’;

The care is taken to keep the reader entertained, to hold her attention; the writer is up against the reader’s distractedness, her failing concentration. The wish always to be somewhere else, at least in one’s mind. The get-out clause in any act of reading.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.

The project, so to speak, is to stop the relentless transmission of misery. What is believed in, or at least what is being proffered and proposed, is simply the getting out, the breaking of the cycle.

You might say, I suppose, that the narrator of the poem is telling us to be the guardians or protectors of all the unconceived children; that it would be good, for us and for them, for us not to inflict life on them