Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life - Softcover

PHILLIPS, ADAM

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250043514 ISBN 13: 9781250043511

Publisher: Picador Paper, 2013

Synopsis

A TRANSFORMATIVE BOOK ABOUT THE LIVES WE WISH WE HAD AND WHAT THEY CAN TEACH US ABOUT WHO WE ARE

All of us lead two parallel lives: the one we are actively living, and the one we feel we should have had or might yet have. As hard as we try to exist in the moment, the unlived life is an inescapable presence, a shadow at our heels. And this itself can become the story of our lives: an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires. We become haunted by the myth of our own potential, of what we have in ourselves to be or to do. And this can make of our lives a perpetual game of falling short.

But what happens if we remove the idea of failure from the equation? With his flair for graceful paradox, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests that if we accept frustration as a way of outlining what we really want, satisfaction suddenly becomes possible. To crave a life without frustration is to crave a life without the potential to identify and accomplish our desires.

In Missing Out, an elegant, compassionate, and absorbing book, Phillips draws deeply on his own clinical experience as well as on the works of Shakespeare and Freud, of D. W. Winnicott and William James, to suggest that frustration, not getting it, and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives--and may be essential to the one fully lived.

About this title

Review:

"A wonderfully concise appeal for presentness...Elegantly stated." --The Boston Globe

"Missing Out is [Adam Phillips's] most poetic, paradoxical, repetitive, and punning yet; he doesn't argue in a linear fashion but nestles ideas within ideas, like Russian dolls." --Sheila Heti, The New York Times Book Review

"[Adam Phillips] has an elegant prose style...with a talent for turning a phrase, a knack for epigrams" --Los Angeles Review of Books

"Extraordinary...Always humane, never reductive, Phillips is one of those writers whom it is a pleasure simply to hear think." --The Sunday Telegraph (London)

About the Author:

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York who writes frequently for the London Review of Books. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; Going Sane; Side Effects; and On Balance. He is also the coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

About this edition

• Publisher: Picador Paper
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1250043514
• ISBN 13: 9781250043511
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224