nicolePsychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ recent book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life examines the tender, private narratives of the often secret fantasies, what-ifs, and and-thens that comprise the hazards of human agency and cosmic chance. The book, at its most poignant moments, is a paean to our lives of mundane inner longing and fictionalizing. Phillips finds that we each, to a certain degree, live parallel lives: the one we are living and the ones we might have lived. He interprets this phenomenon within a framework of agency, in which each choice we make forecloses infinite alternate paths, though our agency is of course imperfect, negotiating expanses of contingency and randomness.

Phillips sees the unlived life as deeply essential to the fabric of our lived lives, with our lived life ‘an elegy to unmet needs and sacrificed desires.’ Haunted by the myth of what could have been, Phillips believes our experience of frustration is the most potent index to our desires. He suggests that learning to use our frustrations, rather than avoiding the experience of dissatisfaction, may be our key to a life fully lived. I have no claim to psychoanalytic or therapeutic credentials, but wish to explore, for a moment, this dialectic between lives lived and unlived.

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