Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

by Adam Phillips

what one wants to know about the other, unconsciously, is what will cure us of our desire for them.

we want release from wanting

the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch.

post 4/15 bombings

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.

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. Larkin first mentions this poem in a letter to Anthony Thwaite of 1971:

Your mum and dad ‘fuck you up’ but they also fuck you into being.

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.

‘Perhaps it is only in childhood,’ Graham Greene writes in his essay ‘The Lost Child’, that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views we already hold, but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already … But in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future, and like the fortune-teller who sees a long journey in the cards or death by water

We see a future of satisfaction in a present of deprivation.

The project, one might say, is to not know what one is getting out of. The get-out clause precedes the experience.

It may, for example, be a good question to ask of any text, or indeed of any theory (like psychoanalysis): what does it get you out of? Not just what does it get you out of having to believe, or abide by, but what mood, what state of mind does it release you from?

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. It is a paradoxical idea that the human subject begins by trying to get out of having what we call relationships, exchanges, with others; that he gets into relationships only by trying to get out of them.

The way in is through the out door; avoiding things is a way of attending to them, of keeping them in mind.

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?

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; they are, in fact, against desiring, both up against it and in opposition to it.

‘I think that throughout this historical period,’ Lacan continues in his blithe, sweeping way, the desire of man, which has been felt, anaesthetized, put to sleep by moralists, domesticated by educators, betrayed by the academies, has quite simply taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for knowledge. That’s the passion that’s currently going great guns and is far from having said its last word.

Once Othello is so forced to think of satisfaction he can think only of revenge and murder.

this passage intimates satisfaction here leads to death ?

‘The problem,’ Richard Rorty once wrote, ‘is that love (and therefore courage and cowardice, sacrifice and selfishness) looks different after one has read Freud.’

What we learn from experience is that experience keeps stripping us of dearly held beliefs, about ourselves and others. We

Once, of course, our satisfactions were provided by our parents, or the people who looked after us when we were young. And it is clearly a very significant moment, or series of moments, in a child’s life when he begins to notice that there are satisfactions outside the family. This can feel to the child like a murder of the parents, like an act of outrageous and frightening ruthlessness.

Annette Baier writes (in Reflections on How We Live)

she writes the next quote reflecting on Freud...

‘What, after all, did Freud teach us about love?’ she asks: That it begins in dependency, that its first object is the more powerful but loving mother who has been the loving infant’s whole world, and who remains the source of nourishment, security and pleasure. The pathologies of love all develop from this initial situation of unequal dependency. Mother love, if it is to be good of its kind, has to avoid both exploitation of the mother’s immensely superior power and that total self-abnegation that turns the infant into a tyrant. Love between unequals in power is good of its kind when it prepares the less powerful one for love between equals. It fails when what it produces is either a toleration of prolonged unequal dependency, or a fear of any dependency, rather than a readiness for reciprocal and equal dependency.

that love can never be between equals because love makes people unequal. It returns them to, it reminds them of, an initiating inequality. Love is the medium in which people become unequal, and for the reasons actually spelled out by Baier; the original situation of unequal dependency (or, as the analyst Enid Balint remarked many years ago, the mother is everything to the infant, but the infant is not everything to the mother).

Childhood trauma is the consequence of the uses and abuses of early dependency; and what Stoller calls ‘trauma’ may be simply another word for ‘childhood’; childhood being the cumulative trauma of the inevitable suffering of unequal dependence; the idea of equality prompted by this ineluctable first fact.

although this quote may be controversial it is true and powerful

We should perhaps be searching for better versions of unequal dependency than for the eradication of this particular inequality; or for different forms of satisfaction. The precondition for what Stoller calls ‘full satisfaction’ for all of us, to varying extents, is revenge.

Frustration can be borne only through a picture of satisfaction;

The child is hungry, fantasizes the breast, and if the mother is sufficiently reliable and comes sooner rather than later, the child has a sense of certainty about his imagined knowledge; he is hungry, he fantasizes the breast, and it arrives; this is called trust.

It is easy to see, given the assault course that is satisfaction, why certainties are sought and revenge taken. Or, to put it slightly differently, why states of conviction and revenge are our preferred self-cures; the ways we restore ourselves by magically concealing our dependence on independent others for our satisfaction.

Madness, and the acting of it, is clearly about frustration, about not getting it, about getting away with it, about getting out of it, and about satisfaction.

Part of the terror about so-called madness is that it represents one of our unlived lives, something that might have happened to us, something we might have done; something that may have been the only solution to the direst of circumstances.

The play, of course, is scripted; the psychoanalyst shows the patient how he uses his script to defend himself against his madness. The psychoanalysis, at least by intention, is therapeutic if not actually curative; the theatrical performance does not circumscribe its aims. In one of these social forms the listener is paid, and in the other he pays. What the theatre world and the profession of psychoanalysis both believe is that the mad are worth listening to; indeed, may be among the people who are most worth listening to. Or, to put it slightly differently, the mad parts of ourselves may be the parts (in both senses) worth taking in. But it may be very important that there is somewhere in a culture where people must pay to listen to the mad, rather than the other way round.

along the lines of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s suggestion that if we want to understand a person and their symptoms we need to see what kind of environment they create for themselves, what sort of world they make (a so-called symptom, for example, might be like a rule other people have to abide by, a love-test or a conversation-stopper). What Winnicott means by the ‘environment’ a person creates around them is what people call up in other people, what versions of other people they induce or preclude, through their symptoms, through the ways they make a nuisance of themselves.

‘What is most difficult to resolve and cure,’ the psychoanalyst Masud Khan wrote in The Privacy of the Self, ‘is the patient’s practice of self-cure. To cure a cure is the paradox that faces us…’ Symptoms are always a form of self-cure;