Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

So we might consider what it would be to live a life in which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get; and our picture of this can be, in adult life, when we are lost in thought, absorbed in something without needing to know why we are absorbed, or indeed what we are absorbed in; or when we dream. Or, going back to the life of the infant, the life before jokes, before language,

There is, in other words, a freedom – a freedom from the tyranny of perfection

All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.

As though the will to understand – our second nature, as it were – was sometimes a distraction from, or an evasion of, something more valuable or even more pleasurable.

you could also say, perhaps less obviously, that if you want to be with somebody who gets you, you prefer collusion to desire, safety to excitement (sometimes good things to prefer but not always the things most wanted). 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. There

What would it be to be a person whom no one could easily describe,

If you don’t want intelligibility, what do you want instead? Do you stop using the word ‘understanding’ and start using the word ‘redescription’? Do you give an account that does not aspire to be an explanation? Infants and young children have to be, in a certain sense, understood by their parents; but perhaps understanding is one thing we can do with each other

but also something that can be limiting, regressive, more suited to our younger selves; that can indeed be our most culturally sanctioned defence against other kinds of experience – sexuality being the obvious case in point – that are not subject to understanding, or which understanding has nothing to do with, or is merely a distraction from.

It is not an increase in self-knowledge that Freud describes, but its limits.

Psychoanalysis is, in fact, the treatment that weans people from their compulsion to understand and be understood; it is an ‘after-education’ in not getting it.

What Žižek calls ‘the attitude of overinterpretation’ is a self-cure for the fear of what I am calling ‘not getting it’. Overinterpretation is getting it with a vengeance. It betrays an anxiety, so to speak, of not being close enough to, not being of

What he is really tortured by, Cavell says, is this knowledge of dependence; so, in effect, he has fast-forwarded it to the catastrophe he has always feared – her abandonment – and solved the problem by killing her. And, of course, by murdering her he has indeed ensured that she will never betray him (and she has abandoned him for ever). Tragedy, Cavell writes, ‘is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover’.

We have to, in Cavell’s language, abrogate the knowing of other people in favour of the acknowledgement of their existence. We mustn’t let knowing do the work of acknowledging; otherwise we can end up disbelieving – that is, being unable to prove – the existence of other people and then of ourselves.

What is revealed is the male characters’ way of knowing the women, and the consequences of what Melanie Klein called their ‘espistemophilic instinct’. When it comes to sexuality, we don’t get it. But this doesn’t mean that we just haven’t yet come up with the right way of knowing, the kind of knowing suited to our sexual natures. It means that when it comes to sex we are not going to get

It seems odd to say that we know people but we don’t know them as desiring creatures; that in so far as we can accept people, including the people who are children, as sexual we have to concede that knowing them in any conscious way may not be the best, the most promising, thing we can do with them.

Not knowing someone, not getting it, then becomes integral to the project of sustaining desire. The wish to know someone – the wish to get it, the person, the poem, the joke – can be the wish to quell, to temper, anticipatory excitement; or even to get rid of our desire for them.

When does having or wanting to get it narrow our minds? Is there a taken-for-granted tyranny – is there someone ordering us around in our minds to try to get it? What psychoanalysis and literary criticism have in common, at its most minimal, is the wish to give an account of something,

The humanities, a literary education, are a training in getting away with it; in making, in this case, something fatuous into an essential commodity

Literature both helps you get away with it and exposes other people’s getting away with it; indeed, it might get away with it by exposing the way other people get away with it.

If, as Freud remarks, the child’s first successful lie against the parents is his first moment of independence – the moment when he proves to himself that his parents cannot read his mind, and so are not omniscient deities – then it is also the first moment in which he recognizes his abandonment.

When you get away with it – let’s call the ‘it’, for the sake of argument, a crime, even though ‘getting away with it’ can change its status – something about the higher authority has been exposed; its weakness, its fallibility, its capacity for oversight, certainly its omnipotence; and so something about your relationship to this authority has changed

Most stories – and all morally improving stories – are about why and how we can’t get away with the things we shouldn’t be getting away with; they are about why, to adapt Stanley Fish’s title, there’s no such thing as getting away with it, and it’s a good thing too. Most stories, that is to say, confirm the (constitutive) idea of transgression.

the mind, at least in the Freudian story, is also the place where, as Hamlet remarks, no one ever gets away with anything. What Lacan calls ‘the obscene super-ego’ is far more scrupulous in its attentions, and more brutal in its punishments, than external authority can ever be. One of the reassurances of psychoanalysis is that it shows us that we can’t get away with anything,

We have to imagine a very paradoxical thing: not that there are no rules – indeed, the opposite, that there are rules we are very impressed by – but our project, our new moral law, so to speak, is to get away with breaking them; the new question being, as Searle suggests, not why did they get away with it, but how? We might have to take seriously the possibility, intimated by the definitions of the phrase in the OED and Webster’s, that a new morality was being announced towards the end of the nineteenth century in America. In this new morality it is not that rules are made to be broken, but that rules are made to be broken without being punished for doing so.

In this apotheosis of privacy we have it both ways: we believe in higher authorities and we believe in avoiding punishment.

The critic, by making the case for only the apparent greatness of the work, is becoming a potential rival. At their best, critics show what writers are getting away with, in both senses – what they are successfully achieving, whatever the means, and how they are cheating us. Hartman’s position vis-à-vis the critic is not worlds apart from the philosopher Richard Rorty’s ‘pragmatist way’,

The Good Person would be replaced by the Impressive Person; and what would impress would be the breaking of rules without punishment; the bearable lightness of being. Where once there were the principled, now there would be the opportunists; the clever would displace the pious. These new moralists would not be amoral, because they would depend on the law for their new morality. They would be self-confessed double agents. They would be able to practise their duplicity only by advertising it. Being caught would be the crime.

Sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize, we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have. And sometimes we need to be able to do this in order to free ourselves. The conviction of Larkin’s narrator comes from his certainty of what will happen to us if we have children. But of course the one thing you cannot know about having children is what it is like to have children if you haven’t got them.

To get out of something may be a blessed relief, but it may also be an unfathomable loss: ‘You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world – that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature – but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid,’ Kafka wrote in his notebook, Zürau Aphorisms.

This is my supposition: we live as if we know more about the experiences we haven’t had than about the experiences we have had. And certain ways of reading aid and abet this strange form of authority – the authority of inexperience, the conviction we gain from not having done things

remember a child telling me in a session – a child who believed, as many children do, that being an adult is the solution to being a child – that the reason he wanted to be bigger was because he wouldn’t have to want to be bigger. I take it that wanting to be older for a child is wanting to have the experiences that can only be looked forward to;

The desire in childhood reading, Greene tells us, is for experiences we haven’t yet had; as children we are not just lacking these experiences, we are not yet ready for them; because they are what we want, they are what we want to know about.

The child, like Greene himself, is a traveller; the adult has arrived: the narcissism of anticipation is replaced by the narcissism of settlement. The child wants to be reassured that there is an enlivening future; the adult wants to be reassured that there isn’t. The child’s desire is to get out of childhood, the adult’s desire is to get out of wanting to change.

It is Freud’s view that we are excessively disturbed by what we will miss out on if we try to enact an unacceptable desire.

Bendrix’s experience, refracted through the language of psychoanalysis, has something to add to all this. It is what the psychoanalyst André Green calls (as I quoted earlier) ‘the permanent dialectic between misrecognition and recognition in psychic work’, the attempt at satisfaction without turning into someone too unacceptable to oneself, or into something unacceptable to the ego. ‘Occultation’ – André Green’s word for the way in which we obscure ourselves – which means ‘hiding’, also has ‘occult’ in it, which might suggest the mystifying of experience, the adding of mystery to experience by hiding from it

Bloom makes a virtue of misrecognition, and prioritizes, in his Freudian way, what the reader needs from the poem, and so what the reader needs the poem for. In Bloom’s account the question ‘Am I getting this poem right?’ is as misleading as the question ‘Am I right to have this need?’ The questions that Rorty asks of a text and that Bloom ‘confesses’ to like – ‘what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean?’ – turn the text into a new-found tool; but unlike a hammer or a saw, its form does not dictate its function; what determines its function is what the reader wants it for.

Rorty’s questions might be rephrased as: What is the text good for getting me out of? What can I use it to get out of? What can I make it mean in order to free me of a previously confining belief or desire? The pragmatist who knows and wants to find out what he doesn’t want, but doesn’t need to know in the same way, with the same certainty, what he really does want, says to the text: get me out of here.

If hate is the precursor of love, then getting out of relationships is the precursor of getting into them; and this, Freud suggests, is the origin of morality. Love starts from hate. The precursor of love is knowing what we don’t want, what we want to get out of. It is not surprising, though it needs to be teased out, why this should be the origin of morality, at least in Freud’s view. In my version of strong reading, the strong reader is trying to rediscover what he hates, and he is looking for clues about how he can get out of it.

If all novels, as Tony Tanner once suggested, are about adultery, then they are all about people getting out of something that has become unbearable. As are Genesis, all Greek tragedies, all the great epic poems, all of Shakespeare’s plays, and so on. Wanting to get out of it is not, in this sense, news; or, perhaps, it is the news that stays news, i.e., the eternal personal and political project. Psychoanalysis, one might say, is a modern formalization of the ultimate modern predicament, as is Marxism.

Freud describes how much work we do to ensure that our satisfaction is no surprise. And this leaves us with a paradox, which has to take the form of a question: when you already know what satisfaction is, how can you possibly find out what it is like?

They are like adverts for desiring. How strange this is; the ways in which fantasy at once blackmails or seduces or lures us into going through with our wanting, and at the same time pre-empts our going through with it; that we have to do this to ourselves, as though we are at best resistant and at worst phobic of wanting, of acknowledging our wants. We have to be attentive, in other words, to what we use fantasy to do; whether it becomes, as we say, an end in itself.

fantasies of satisfaction are defences against desiring, the attempt in fantasy to take the risk out of the desire; or to put it in more Kleinian language, fantasies of satisfaction are attacks on desire;

Tragedies are dramas in which satisfactions are too exactly imagined by their heroes, and then too ruthlessly believed in and pursued

Winnicott’s comment that it is ‘the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others’

Certain knowledge is punishment for Oedipus, his revenge, as it were, on himself. So, we might ask, is the psychoanalytic project the individual’s revenge on himself through knowledge?

a question of how, when satisfaction is sought – satisfaction of a certain kind – evidence becomes the issue. And in this sense the play links empiricism with desire, and particularly with revenge. The satisfactions of evidence are the satisfactions of making a case, for or against,

Satisfaction exists in what philosophers call ‘the space of reasons’, what Robert Brandom in Reason in Philosophy calls ‘the social practices of giving and asking for reasons’. Satisfaction has its reasons, and without them it isn’t possible; and the satisfaction requiring such reasons, in Othello, is the satisfaction of murdering a rival male or a frustrating woman. Satisfaction linked to entitlement. In

To put it another way: tragedies occur when people get their sense of entitlement wrong. The question then arises, is it possible to be wrong about one’s entitlement? And if so, where do the criteria for this wrongness come from?

Disillusionment may be tragic, may, rather, have its tragic side, but the true havoc of tragedy, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is of disillusionment avoided. It is not that Desdemona is unfaithful; it is, as Cavell intimates, that Othello can’t bear to acknowledge that she is not under his remote control.

What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We can’t afford to live as though certain things are true about ourselves. Our satisfactions have to be realigned.