Product Description
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
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.
This book is second hand, and while you may not get the same publication/version/reprint/edition shown in the picture it will be the same author and title.
Removing existing stickers from a second hand book may damage it, so we refrain from doing so.
Even if the picture shows no price stickers on the book they may be there on the copy you receive.
All of our books are in very good condition.
Please be aware that there will be a sticker with an identifying number on the spine of this book.
Euro
British Pound