Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life Paperback – December 31, 2013

I heard that Adam Phillips was coming to town to speak and so I investigated and this is the book I chose because it was a topic (missing out) that wove through my life and the life of so many clients.I suggest you read the book the same way that Adam suggested we listen and talk during the day we got to be with him in person: let yourself free associate. If you do, you will find your mind wandering in very useful directions. What I got out of it was the permission to live in all parts of my mind: the 'real' life I have now, and the 'lost' life that I had thought I'd have and didn't, and the 'imagined' life: what I can still hope for for myself in the future. Its a worthy book! if it does have its dry moments.

"In Praise of the Unlived Life," the subtitle of Adam Phillips' new book, his seventeenth, hooked me. Not so surprising since Stephen Vizinczey's classic "In Praise of Older Women - The Amorous Reflections of A.V." sits next to "Thy Neighbor's Wife" by Gay Talese in my bookcase. So what, I wanted Phillips to tell me, am I missing out on?Quite a lot, it turns out. Paradoxically, he asserts, we have become experts in what we don't know and know-little's about what we think we do know. When the going gets tough at work or at home, as our frustration builds with the knots we tie ourselves up in, we develop "omniscience" about what awaits us in our unlived lives. It's not until we leave the job or abandon the family that the green pastures we projected turn out to be less nourishing than the life we confidently expected awaited us.There are a couple of reasons for this. Not only is it impossible to fully know ourselves, more importantly, we can never know what goes on with anyone else, not our children, not our parents, not our wives or sweethearts. So we can't l know how things will turn out if we stay put and try to work out solutions to our frustrations, and we certainly can't know how we will feel with the new job or partner in the unlived life we opted for. To that degree, the book's subtitle title is, if not misleading, disingenuous. Since we can't know the unlived life - we never reach it -- the praise we cloak it in is a mirage.Phillips, a psychoanalyst with years of practice under his belt, has extensive experience to support his conclusions. Moreover, he is sharp as a tack, extremely well read in his field and out, and a writer the New York Times described as "poetic, paradoxical, repetitive and punning." (Shelia Heit's review "Second Selves" appeared in the January 20, 2013 Sunday Book Review.) What more could you ask for?End note. In fact, there is more: the book's appendix titled "On Acting Madness." It tackles what it means to actor, audience and to our understanding of the terrors of madness to perform the role of a madman on stage. Phillips discusses "MacBeth", "King Lear" and David Holman's dramatization of Gogol's "Diary of a Madman." What makes Phillips' essay so telling is that it assumes that madness "represents one of our unlived lives, something that might have happened to us..."

I'll repaste here what I just reviewed of another of his books, Unforbidden Pleasures, because the two go together. I read Adam Phillips "Missing Out". The topic and review sounded fascinating, unusual, something to broaden the thinking and challenge the mind. I was disappointed, and in reading the generous Look Inside of Unforbidden Pleasures it seems the same. Phillips seems very intelligent, extremely well read, puts a lot of work into his books, yet somehow manages to leave me wondering what insight I'm supposed to have received from what he just said. Like he can't get his words out of his own way so he can say what he thinks. Every once in a while he starts to write lucidly and you think, at last, here we go, and then he's back into muddled writing. This book sounds like another fascinating idea, and when I first started reading the Look Inside (lots of pages, presumably chosen by the author to best represent the book) I didn't even remember this was the same author, but as I read the fuzzy writing I had a sense of deja vu. Then I realized it's the same author as Missing Out. I think he has a lot to offer. I wish some very involved editor or a co-author could collaborate and get his insights clearly down on paper.

Loved this book. I think I bought it on accident and I loved its insights. A little over-written and ridiculous at times, but still a wonderful book well worth the effort of getting through some of its tougher passages. 4 stars

I will admit that the end lacked the same substance as the beginning, but the beginning makes the book worth reading. Reading the reviews I was surprised to see so many negative comments, although upon reflection, the book is obviously not for everyone. I bought it after reading Joan Acocella's review in the New Yorker. She did not particularly like the book or understand it, so I figured there was probably something there. I was not disappointed.