Missing Out Quotes

“The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as asults, 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 our most violent form of nostalgia.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“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). The wish to be understood may be our most vengeful demand, may be the way we hang on, as adults, to the grudge against our mothers; the way we never let our mothers of 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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. 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; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the experiences, the things and the people that are absent. It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this often obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit. And yet we quickly notice as children - it is, perhaps, the first thing we do notice - that our needs, like our wishes, are always potentially unmet. Because we are always shadowed by the possibility of not getting what we want, we lean, 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. But we also learn to live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we would like.(…)
There is always what will turn out to be the life we led, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we lived in our minds, the wished-for life (or lives): the risks untaken and the opportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unloved 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. As we know more now than ever before about the kinds of lives it is possible to live - and affluence has allowed more people than ever before to think of their lives in terms of choices and options - we are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do. So when we are not thinking, like the character in Randall Jarrell's poem, that "The ways we miss our lives is life", we are grieving or regretting or resenting our failure to be ourselves as we imagine we could be. We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.
We discover these unloved lives most obviously in our envy of other people, and in the conscious 9and unconscious) demands we make on our children to become something that was beyond us. And, of course, in our daily frustrations. Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual falling-short, a continual and continuing loss, a sustained and sometimes sustaining rage; though at its best it lures us into the future, but without letting us wonder why such lures are required (we become promising through the promises made to us). The myth of potential makes mourning and complaining feel like the realest things we eve do; and makes of our frustration a secret life of grudges. Even if we set aside the inevitable questions - How would we know if we had realized our potential? If we don't have potential what do we have? - we can't imagine our lives without the unloved lives they contain. We have an abiding sense, however obscure and obscured, that the lives we do lead are informed by the lives that escape us. That our lives are defined by loss, but loss of what might have been; loss, that is, of things never experienced.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Everything depends on what we would rather do than change.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“However much you have been wanting and hoping and dreaming of meeting the person of your dreams, it is only when you meet them that you will start missing them. It seems that the presence of an object is required to make its absence felt (or to make the absence of something felt). A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of your frustration in their absence.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Tragic heroes are failed pragmatists. Their ends are unrealistic and their means are impractical.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized 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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“So there is something perhaps more difficult to conceive of, sometimes born of resignation and sometimes not- a life in which not getting it is the point and not the problem; in which the project is to learn how not to ride the bicycle, how not to understand the poem. 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 mind.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“You can’t have a desire without an inspiring sense of lack. What we do to our frustration to make it bearable – evade it, void it, misrecognize it, displace it, hide it, project it, deny it, idealize it, and so on – takes the sting out of its tail.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We make our lives pleasurable, and therefore bearable, by picturing them as they might be; it is less obvious, though, what these compelling fantasy lives - lives of, as it were, a more complete satisfaction - are a self-cure for. Our solutions tell us what our problems are; our fantasy lives are not - or not necessarily - alternatives to, or refuges from, those real lives but an essential part of them. As some critics of psychoanalysis rightly point out, a lot depends on whether our daydreams - our personal preoccupations - turn into political action (and, indeed, on whether our preferred worlds are shared worlds, and on what kind of sharing goes on in them). There is nothing more obscure than the relationship between the lived and the unloved life. (Each member of a couple, for example, is always having a relationship, wittingly or unwittingly, with their partner's unloved lives; their initial and initiating relationship is between what they assume are their potential selves.) So we may need to think of ourselves as always living a double life, the one that we wish for and the one that we practice; the one that never happens and the one that keeps happening.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We need, in other words, to know something about what we don’t get, and about the importance of not getting it.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“indeed that is what our lives are, a project of recovery and restitution; or we have to ironize our always wanting to get something back that we never had and that never existed anyway”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Frustration that is unrecognized, unrepresented, cannot be met or even acknowledged; addiction is always an addiction to frustration (addiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met). What, then, is the relationship, the link, the bond, the affinity between frustration and satisfaction? How do we find ourselves fitting them together or joining them up? There may, for example, be something about frustration that makes it resistant to representation, as though our frustrations are the last thing on earth we want to know about.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“as though frustration were an unbearable form of self-doubt, a state in which we can so little tolerate not knowing what we want, not knowing whether it is available, and not having it that we fabricate certainties to fill the void (we fill in the gaps with states of conviction). The frustration is itself a temptation scene, one in which we must invent something to be tempted by.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We make ourselves out of the demands others make of us, and out of whatever else we can use.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“İnsanlar bizi hüsrana uğratarak gerçeklik duygusu kazanır; hüsran duygusu yaratmadıkları müddetçe fantezi figürleri olarak kalırlar.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Once the next life - the better life, the fuller life - has to be in this one, we have a considerable task on our hands. Now someone is asking us not only to survive but to flourish, not simply or solely to be good but to make the most of our lives. It is a quite different kind of demand. The story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living. (…)
Because we are nothing special - on a par with ants and daffodils - it is the work of culture to make us feel special. (…) This, essentially, is the question psychoanalysis was invented to address: what can 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 unloved life became a haunting presence in a life legitimated by nothing more than the desire to live it. For modern people, stalked by their choices, the good life is a life lived to the full. We become obsessed, in a new way, by what is missing in our lives: and by what sabotages the pleasures that we seek.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“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 around.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Resolving transference... means releasing the patient from the project, which is partly an illusion... of knowing and being known”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“The illusion of knowing another person creates the possibility, the freedom, of not knowing them”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“If you can't bear frustration, can't bear the dependence on and involvement of others that satisfaction entails, you have to precipitate yourself into a state of already having and knowing everything... The self-cure for frustration is omniscience, the delusion of omniscience...”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We are tempted, initially, to be self-satisfying creatures, to live in a fantasy world, to live in our minds, but the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating; but only in the sense that they are disparate from, not in accord with our wished-for satisfactions”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“We never... 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.”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

“Bize anlaşılmayı istemek öğretilmiştir ama bu dilek en kindar talebimiz, yetişkinliğe geçtikten sonra da annelerimize duyduğumuz hınca sarılma, her ihtiyacımızı karşılamadıkları için onları asla affetmeme yöntemimiz de olabilir. Yetişkinler olarak anlaşılmayı istememiz -pek çok şeyin yanı sıra- sahip olduğumuz en vahşi nostalji biçimi olabilir.” s.55”
― Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life