Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit.

Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we learn, at best, to ironize our wishes – that is, to call our wants wishes:

we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.

The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short,

the need to be special stops us from being.

what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing

No one has ever had the adolescence they should have had.

‘the aim of the organism is to die in its own way’.

We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be;

Any ideal, any preferred world, is a way of asking, what kind of world are we living in that makes this the solution (our utopias tell us more about our lived lives, and their privations,

In Freud’s story our possibilities for satisfaction depend upon our capacity for frustration; if we can’t let ourselves feel our frustration – and, surprisingly, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do – we can’t get a sense of what it is we might be wanting, and missing, of what might really give us pleasure (greed is despair about pleasure).

That frustration is where we start from; the child’s dawning awareness of himself is an awareness of something necessary not being there. The child becomes present to himself in the absence of something he needs.

Though Freud is telling us something here about the pleasures of asceticism, this is not a counsel of renunciation; he is recommending frustration as the essential preparation for desire, as the precondition for its flourishing, and for the possibility of there being some 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 (Lear might say to Cordelia, ‘OK, put it in a way that works for you’). The liberal realist would say that this is to misrecognize the nature of human needs.

At the very beginning of a tragedy everyone is a pragmatist;

A tyrant is someone who believes that what he demands is available and can be given (to be entitled is, by definition, not to question the reality of what it is one is entitled to). So,

If you are the frustrator, like Cordelia – the one who in this instance refuses to be complicit with the demand being made, the demand for exorbitant love – you are a different kind of authority; you are the authority on what you are realistically able to give

‘The cause of tragedy,’ Stanley Cavell writes in his great essay on King Lear, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, ‘is that we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change’

The entitled are always too knowing.

Knowing what one wants is a way of not exposing oneself to change

and, by the same token, taking up Cavell’s point, is prone to make us murderous.

Without frustration there can be no satisfaction.

(addiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met).

Frustration, to put it simply, is something we cannot be indifferent to even if indifference can be one of our attempted solutions to it

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

(‘Nothing really happens to him,’ Barbara Everett writes of Lear in Young Hamlet, ‘except that he learns that Cordelia actually exists’).

Does the proud will frustrate, or is it the product of frustration, pride being a state of mind, a way of being organized as a self-cure for certain kinds of frustration? It is to this first deception and making void that we need to turn,

The first scene of King Lear can’t help but make us wonder what the demand for love is a demand for.

The finding of an object, Freud says in a famous pronouncement about the erotic life, is always a refinding of an object. And yet Freud also questions – in a way that was taken up by later psychoanalysts – the reality of these lost and found objects. He intimates – and states outright – that we may never have had this object in the first place, and that we can’t recover it. That the object, the person we are looking for and can never refind because it never existed, was the wished-for one. We never, in other words, recover from our first false solution to feeling frustrated – the inventing of an ideal object of desire with whom we will never feel the frustration we fear. The ideal person in our minds becomes a refuge from realer exchanges with realer people.

there are (at least) four kinds of frustration: the frustration of being deprived of something that has never existed; the frustration of being deprived of something one has never had (whether or not it exists); the frustration of being deprived of something one has had; and, finally, the frustration of being deprived of something one once had, but can’t have again.

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. His first recourse, faced with his frustration, is to attempt to satisfy himself, in fantasy, with a perfect, non-frustrating figure; when this fails, his only recourse is to reality. The failure of an initial wished-for satisfaction leads to the possibility of a more realistic 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.

Thought is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible. Thinking modifies frustration, rather than evading it, by being a means by which we can go from feeling frustrated to figuring out what to do about it, and doing it;

Psychoanalysis tells us that we can understand satisfaction only by understanding frustration, and that we are prone to find frustration unbearable. In this picture, frustration may be the thing that we are least able to let ourselves feel; and by not being able to feel it, to think it, or not being able to feel it or think it enough, we obscure our satisfactions.

if it is our first nature to need, it is our second nature to obscure our frustration; that we don’t want to really think or speak because we don’t want to know the nature of, know the experience of, our fundamental frustrations. We prefer our satisfactions without their requisite frustrations.

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.

we are radically inadequate pleasure-seekers because we are unable to countenance our frustration. We are prone to auricular assurances; we fob ourselves off; we are satisfied by privation; we fail to make amends for our frustration. We avoid making better pictures of the exchanges that we seek.

Both Lear and Gloucester ask their (favourite) children for something – for love and for death – and they are both refused. Both their claims – for special love and assisted suicide – are felt to be impossible by Cordelia and Edgar. Clearly, parents and children want the impossible from each other. This is the tragedy of everyday life. 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.

It is worth remembering that in what is called growing up, not getting it precedes getting it. Our frustration comes before, is the precondition for, our satisfaction.

Getting what people say, for example, may be complicity, may reveal you are a member of a cult; or colluding with someone to protect yourself from unwanted experiences; or that you prefer agreement to revision or conflict. And this might mean, in this context, not always assuming that there is an it to get; living as if missing the point – having the courage of one’s naivety – could also be a point. Not assuming, as I think we do more often than we realize, that the joke – after God’s providential design, and the laws of nature – is our best model of how things work, especially between people. 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. Or, everyone is naive all the time.

It is assumed, rightly, in this picture that parenting is a form of aesthetics, that the parents’ attention to their child is organized around what is acceptable and unacceptable to them about the child (the myth of unconditional love is there to conceal this). The parents want to keep their child as ‘beautiful’ as possible, that is, they want their feelings about the child to be as beautiful (that is, acceptable) as possible – and this is something that the child has to of necessity collude with; but the child is also something else, something out of the orbit of the parents’ desire (in this sense growing up is a quest for illegitimacy).

I experience you as a shy person when you are in fact someone who desires me or loathes me. Not getting it is here conceived of as an essential, self-protective project; the consequence of it – of this evolving solution to disruptive feeling – is an estrangement from what Malan calls an ‘emotional core’. Real feeling is replaced by defences against it, and the defences come to seem to be what one is really feeling (all these stories depend on there being feelings that can be identified as real). Not getting it here means not getting emotional contact with yourself and others; feeling ceases to be the medium of contact and exchange between people, but becomes an intricate system of unassuaging evasions.

I make myself, I turn myself, into a nice, kind, gentle person. In this psychic alchemy, this magical act, this disappearing act, I reappear as acceptable to others, and therefore to myself (that is the logical order here). And what happens to the anger? It comes out as what are called ‘symptoms’, prevailing forms of unease. Symptoms, in this sense, are obscured communications.

The child is the unrecognized recognizer.

Meaning is imposed wherever experience is disturbing;

And children will always need to try to satisfy their parents, to become what they assume the parents need, and find themselves both unwilling and unable to do this. (No child ever recovers from not having cured his parents.) But what happens if we draw a line from the parent and child in this formative and familiar drama of getting it and not getting it to the adult the child will become and the objects in the cultural field that begin to engage her. And then ask a simple question: why is it so difficult to enjoy not getting it?

We have been educated to think of language, and of people, as something we can get, and in what might be called the fullest sense of the word. Getting it, or not getting it – both the experience, which is acute, and the phrase, which seems not to be – reminds us of the investment we are brought up to have in understanding as a measure of intimacy and competence; and of how hard a word ‘understanding’ is to understand. The understanding between people supposedly referring to some shared foundations, or to what might be underneath where we stand.

If getting it gives us some kind of pleasure, what are the pleasures of not getting it, of being, as we say, left out or in the dark, or clueless? It can be humiliating not to get it – indeed, I want to suggest that humiliation is always a form of not getting it, and that humiliation sheds a unique and horrifying light on what not getting it might be about. But I also want to suggest that we are under considerable pressure to get it; that,

Children are people who don’t get it, until they do; so we might have to consider what is lost, what has to be given up, in the struggle to get it, the struggle that once you have got it feels like no struggle at all. Getting it, as we shall see, means not being humiliated (or not recruiting the ‘it’ to diminish you);

The art teacher is called to do something that he is already doing, and he doesn’t get it, and not getting it here means being confounded, being undone, being diminished, by his mother’s words; he is left feeling that his agency, or rather his desire, is confused or compromised, or even stolen from him; he thought he was doing something good that he wanted to do –