Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living,

What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent.

notice – that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet.

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: a wish is only a wish until, as we say, it comes true – and, at worst, to hate our needs.

in coconjunction w Freuds Lie Children Tell

We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason – and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason – they were not possible.

And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives. Indeed, our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.

sounds almost humanistic

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

The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we ever do;

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.

So it is worth wondering what the need to be special prevents us seeing about ourselves – other, that is, than the unfailing transience of our lives;

question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what kind of pleasures can sustain a creature that is nothing special?

Once the promise of immortality, of being chosen, was displaced by the promise of more life – the promise, as we say, of getting more out of life – the unlived life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing

add to sticks and stones

Freud, in other words, like Camus after him – implicitly, but without quite saying so – believed that the only question, if not the only philosophical question, was whether or not to commit suicide.

we bridge the gap between what we are and what we want to be as if by magic;

in our wishes

Freud wrote in ‘Contributions to the Psychology of Erotic Life’, ‘that the psychical significance of a drive rises in proportion to its frustration.’

When we are frustrated, the unlived life is always beckoning; the unlived life of gratified desire returns as a possibility. Waiting too long poisons desire, but waiting too little pre-empts it; the imagining is in the waiting. In consciously contrived instant gratification, neither desire nor the object of desire is sufficiently imagined. Wanting takes time; partly because it takes some time to get over the resistances to wanting, and partly because we are often unconscious of what it is that we do want. 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.

for sticks and stones

Lives are tragic not merely when people can’t have everything they want but when their wanting mutilates them;

Tragedies begin with a person in an emerging state of frustration, beginning to feel the need of something; and at the beginning, for the protagonists, they are not yet tragedies.

we would rather murder the world than permit it to expose us to change’

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;

Frustration is always, whatever else it is, a temptation scene; something we are tempted to get rid of, something we crave false solutions to, something that lures us into the more radical self-deceptions.

for sgicks and stones

Frustration that is unrecognized, unrepresented, cannot be met or even acknowledged; addiction is always an addiction to frustration (addiction is unformulated frustration,

s&s

To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there.

family romance

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;

it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them.

what is missing, what we need, what, in Lacan’s terminology, we lack.

The finding of an object, Freud says in a famous pronouncement about the erotic life, is always a refinding of an object.

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.

inventing of an ideal object of desire with whom we will never feel the frustration we fear.

(Lacan, in the hyperbolic version of this, said love is giving something you haven’t got to someone who doesn’t exist).

Freud is describing a simple process: you are hungry, you fantasize a delicious meal, this fantasy doesn’t satisfy you, doesn’t nourish you or fill you up, and you start working out how in the world you can have this meal that you imagine. You begin by hallucinating, that is, fantasizing, and you end up trying to get the wishedfor meal in the real world, which will at best be only an approximation of the one you wanted, but has the advantage of being one you can actually eat. 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. Once satisfaction by means of fantasy breaks down, then, Freud says, the individual has ‘to form an idea of the real circumstances in the outside world and to endeavour actually to change them’. There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction i...

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; what Freud called ‘trial action

s&s

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.

The self-cure for frustration is omniscience, the delusion of omniscience (there must be a figure somewhere who is exempt from frustration, and this is God;

if we don’t feel frustration we don’t discover whether we have the wherewithal to deal with reality. People become real to us by frustrating us; if they don’t frustrate us they are merely figures of fantasy.

s&s

Freud once remarked, no one ever quite knows what it is about a joke that amuses them. We can get pleasure from a joke only when we understand it, but we don’t always understand our understanding.

The ego in the Freudian story – ourselves as we prefer to be seen – is like a picture with a frame around it, and the function of the frame is to keep the picture intact.

consumer capitalism educates us in the virtues and easy pleasures of knowing ourselves and knowing what we want (knowing ourselves meaning simply knowing what we want to have).

for perfect storm= we don't know what we really want, accept what we are told,and feel empty or wrong bc we dont understand only in analysis can you come to a realization that we fear that very understanding as much as we seek it out

The familiar, and indeed salient, example Malan gives is of anger. ‘If a child is consistently punished for the expression of anger,’ he continues, he will begin to get anxious when angry and will learn ways to avoid its expression. Let’s say that passivity and withdrawal become the child’s strategies of choice for avoiding the experience and expression of anger (and its feared consequences). Eventually, he may retreat to this position so automatically that even he is unaware of feeling angry inside. The defences come to replace the feeling itself and can result in character pathology (e.g., passive aggressive or avoidant personality disorders), affecting all future relationships. This, one could say, is a story of the genesis of someone not getting it, of a person over time not recognizing their feelings; they experience themselves as withdrawn or passive or blank when they are in fact angry; and so, by the same token, making it impossible for the other person to recognize what they are feeling – I experience you as a shy person when you are in fact someone who desires me or loathes me.

One is doubly left out, from one’s so-called emotional core and from other people; unpaid on both sides.

You will be attentive to the needs of the other person, and they will see in you only what they want to see. You must sacrifice being recognized for recognizing. Your project, so to speak, is to fit in with what the other wants you to be (or what you imagine they want you to be); but there are aspects of

We are accomplices struggling to become collaborators

Me?!

(In Jack Tizard’s obituary for the psychoanalyst and paediatrician D. W. Winnicott, he wrote that it wasn’t the case that Winnicott understood children, but that they understood him.)

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.

Only the idealized mother – the perfect, wished-for mother in the child’s mind – always gets it.

only in the mind

There is, in other words, a freedom – a freedom from the tyranny of perfection – in not understanding and in not being understood

All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of s...

Or, to put it the other way round, this would be a life in which getting it – the will to get it, the ambition to get it – was the problem; in which wanting to be an accomplice didn’t take precedence over making up one’s own mind.

th problem ofwanting to date

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. Knowing other people, in psychoanalytic language, can be a defence, the defence, against acknowledging their actual existence, and what we need their existence for.

wow he can write

Psychoanalysis, as a treatment, is an opportunity to recover the freedom not to know or be known, and so to find out what people might do together instead.