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Book Cover for: Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, Adam Phillips

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

Adam Phillips

From the leading psychoanalyst Adam Phillips comes Missing Out, 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 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 this 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 and getting away with it are all chapters in our unlived lives--and may be essential to the one fully lived.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Dec 31st, 2013
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.33in - 5.47in - 0.59in - 0.43lb
  • EAN: 9781250043511
  • Categories: Psychotherapy - PsychoanalysisSocial

About the Author

Phillips, Adam: - Adam Phillips is one of the foremost psychoanalysts practicing in the world today, and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of many books, including On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored; and On Balance. He is also coauthor, with the historian Barbara Taylor, of On Kindness.

More books by Adam Phillips

Book Cover for: On Giving Up, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, Stephen Greenblatt
Book Cover for: On Wanting to Change, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Attention Seeking, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: On Getting Better, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: The Cure for Psychoanalysis, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: On Kindness, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Winnicott, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Monogamy, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Going Sane, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Equals, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: On Flirtation, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Houdini's Box: The Art of Escape, Adam Phillips
Book Cover for: Darwin's Worms: On Life Stories and Death Stories, Adam Phillips

Praise for this book

"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)