Read Anywhere and on Any Device!

Subscribe to Read | $0.00

Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!

Create Free Account

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

3.4/5 ( ratings)

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 it might be that 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 this 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 Donald Winnicott and William James, to suggest that missing out, getting away with it, and not getting it are all chapters in our unlived lives--and may be essential to the one fully lived.

Language: English

Pages: 224

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Release: June 01, 2012

ISBN: 024114387X

ISBN 13: 9780241143872

Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

3.4/5 ( ratings)

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 it might be that 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 this 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 Donald Winnicott and William James, to suggest that missing out, getting away with it, and not getting it are all chapters in our unlived lives--and may be essential to the one fully lived.

Language: English

Pages: 224

Format: Hardcover

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Release: June 01, 2012

ISBN: 024114387X

ISBN 13: 9780241143872

More books from Adam Phillips

The Uncanny

3.9/5 ( ratings)

A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful

3.7/5 ( ratings)

On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life

3.8/5 ( ratings)

On Kindness

3.4/5 ( ratings)

Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

3.6/5 ( ratings)

Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

3.9/5 ( ratings)

On Flirtation

Winnicott

Terrors and Experts

4.1/5 ( ratings)

Unforbidden Pleasures

3.4/5 ( ratings)

The Cure for Psychoanalysis

4.2/5 ( ratings)

Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney

4.2/5 ( ratings)

New Masters of Flash: Volume 3

4.4/5 ( ratings)

Stories from Funeral Celebrants

3.7/5 ( ratings)

Matthew Barney: The Drawings

4.5/5 ( ratings)

Michael Douglas: The Unofficial Biography

2.5/5 ( ratings)

The Fictioneer Summer 2014: A Literary Journal

The Concise Dictionary Of Dress

2.3/5 ( ratings)

Flash MX Most Wanted Effects and Movies

Wunschlos Glucklich?: Uber Seelische Gesundheit Und Den Alltaglichen Wahnsinn

Rate this book!

Write a review?