Status Updates From Missing Out: In Praise of t...

…How do you know what your desire is? It is that which makes you feel guilty when you betray it; not when when you betray someone else, but when you betray yourself; indeed, for Lacan self-betrayal, the self-betrayal of giving up on one’s desire, is the source of guilt. We suffer from failures of ruthlessness…___Adam Phillips from Missing Out

…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. ___Adam Phillips from Missing Out

Staying with a psychoanalytical discourse is hard, for starters.

Oh boy, the first chapter was incredible, but this chapter on "getting it" is almost impossible to "get". Mr. Phillips is obviously very intelligent, I'm hoping he gets back in the groove soon.

I can't recall why I picked this off the shelf, and I have no idea where the author is going. But so far, every paragraph has made me pause and ponder. An avalanche of new ideas.

"The mad are people who have never found, o r never made, or never had, a sufficiently attentive audience. And this in itself might make us wonder what an audience is for. And remind us that the first audience is family. And how they responded to our first performance is integral to who we are; and what we feel about performing."

"In every generation there are quite firm rules on how to behave when you are crazy."

Ian Hacking

Philip Larkin to Haffenden: " I've said that depression to me is like daffodils were to Wordsworth"

This made me laugh :D

"On getting Away with It" is utterly useless chapter

"Can we learn how not to know, as well as how to know, and what could be the benefit that might accrue from this? Or, in which area of our lives does not knowing, not getting it, give us more life rather than more deadness? When does having or wanting to get it narrow our minds?"

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

Freud's 'transference' basically

"The wish to know someone - 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."