Missing Out (Adam Phillips) BOOK REVIEW

hello everyone this video is about this book missing out by adam phillips before i get into the discussion of this book i would also like to say that this weekend we have a discussion meeting an event it's a book club event which would be supposed to be an informal discussion about this book if you're interested in that to know more about it register for it the link is in the description of this video adam phillips is a practicing psychoanalyst and he has written or co-written many books including on balance becoming freud unforbidden pleasures and a forthcoming book titled the cure of psychoanalysis missing out the full title is missing out in praise of the unlived life it's published in 2012 and it is the first book that i read by him and i found it to be very impressive as the title suggests the book is concerned with that side of life that we often recognize as unlived the paths not taken missed opportunities the potentials that have not and maybe will never become actual this idea this concept of missing out applies to a wide range of situations including relatively mundane situations like not going to a party and then missing out on the fun that other people have in the party all the way to the more serious and even tragic situations like having the thought or the feeling that you might be missing out on the life experience of a normal sane successful respected member of the society so it is a widely relevant idea a problem that the book is tackling but the relevance of the topic shouldn't deceive us into thinking that the book is easy to read easy to understand or that it contains a set of practical tips on how to deal with the feeling of missing out this is not a self-help book of course that is not to say that it is not helpful it will be helpful but the way in which it can be helpful is not in that straightforward way that self-help books promise to be what philips offers us is an exploration of an analysis of several interrelated themes in particular his exploration illuminates what it means to be a grown-up a responsible adult someone who is interested in reality interested in being in contact with reality including the reality of other people the fact that other people have a reality and we depend on them sometimes sometimes they depend on us that reality is unpredictable sometimes that unpredictability can be frustrating for us so the reality including the reality of other people and the reality that is reflected in our own feelings the fact that sometimes we don't understand the reality of our own experience he also offers an understanding of some aspect of contemporary culture the culture that urges us to live paradoxical lives satisfy conflicting goals constantly seek win-win situations a kind of life that doesn't really involve any sacrifice and a kind of life that never misses out on any opportunity i think it would be true to say that our contemporary culture the way that our thinking and our imagination is is shaped the style of our imagination the style with which we tend to reason about our lives has made a taboo out of the feeling of missing out so we usually feel a kind of shame and humiliation with with regards to missing things out missing out opportunities the book is divided into a prologue five main chapters and an appendix the main chapters are titled on frustration that's the first chapter second chapter is titled on not getting it third on getting away with it fourth on getting out of it and fifth on satisfaction the structure of the book is circular the topics the way the topics are related to each other is circular so at the end when we reach the end of the chapter on satisfaction it links back to the first chapter considering frustration phillips invites us to see how this feeling of frustration isn't just a demand for what we lack but results from knowledge and a set of tacit decisions it arises from the way we have settled matters for ourselves so when we say that person frustrates me he or she could give me what i need but they are choosing not to so you see that there are certain things certain kinds of knowledge that is implied in that feeling of frustration that that person is able to give me what i need but they are maybe choosing not to do that similarly we might say this situation frustrates me this can and should work out for me but but it is not the situation is not working out for me if i'm frustrated by my friend that implies that i am confident about what my friend can do for me maybe i'll be led into believing that my friend is choosing to frustrate me phillips reminds us quote only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration end quote after reading his treatment of frustration we are reminded that there is always more to frustrations than what appears to us at first and that frustration is unavoidable insofar as we must live in the real world that is outside our fantasies getting it or i'm not getting it the topic of the second chapter explores the reasons why we want and need to get it including get what someone means get the meaning of a situation get the joke get the meaning of a poem and so on so forth and why after that understanding why we might want to consider living a life in which not getting it can also at least some of the times become our goal sometimes we intentionally might want to construct a situation in which not getting it is an aim in connection to this idea phillips brings in freud and psychoanalysis and the way he brings in fruit is not freud the dogmatist but a freud as a liberating vision liberating project quote psychoanalysis is in fact a treatment that wins people from their compulsion to understand and be understood it is an after education in not getting it through understanding the limits of understanding this is for its new version of an old project ford's work is best read as a long elegy for the intelligibility of our lives we make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense this is from the chapter on not getting it in the third chapter on getting away with it we read about the new morality of our age the morality that our culture urges us to adopt or to celebrate according to this morality we are not supposed to take the type of responsibility that challenges the rules overtly while also avoiding the type of responsibility that follows rules we are encouraged to constantly find loopholes to have our cakes and eat them too to find how we can make an exception of ourselves to be exceptional in that in the sense of getting away with things that most people are not able to get away with the fourth chapter on getting out of it introduces us to a way of thinking and a way of reading literature that aims at getting out a method for actively missing out on what we hate so we recognize by reading different things we recognize we remember what we hate and we try to avoid that to get out of that intentionally so here the concept of missing out becomes something that we actively pursue a related and very interesting line of thought in this chapter is about how confident we often feel about knowing what is beyond our experience so here's an interesting quote sometimes perhaps more often than not we think we know more about the experiences we don't have than about the experiences that we do have frustration being our word for the experience of not having an experience i'm struck for example by how much people talk in analytic treatments about the experiences they have not had in the experiences that they have had and how authoritatively with what passion and conviction they talk about what they have missed out on end quote this is from the chapter on getting out of it something to note here you might expect phillips being a psychoanalyst to use examples from his own case studies from the experience of with people who come to him for analysis but he almost uses no examples from his experience as an analyst that might be because he is positioning himself primarily as the analysand when he's writing i'm inclined towards this way of thinking about his writing based on his free associating style his style is very free in as in free association and the way he follows images and literary fragments jumping from one image to the next is like being reminded of a quote by another author the examples in the book are mostly from literature and those are mostly from shakespeare so if you enjoy thinking about shakespeare's plays and if you enjoy reading commentaries and commentaries on commentaries about shakespeare especially from a psychoanalytic perspective you will enjoy this book the appendix which is titled on acting madness based on lecture phillips gave about theater at the brooklyn academy of music can be read before or after the rest of the book this essay the appendix is a fresh look at the ideas discussed in the main chapters bringing in new ideas about performance self-presentation what it means to have an audience which is quite a complicated concept you don't normally reflect on what is involved what is implied in that idea of having an audience being understood by an audience being observed by an audience the notions of sanity and madness the distance that is at once and paradoxically eliminated and extended in confronting madness so the confrontation with madness at the same time eliminates the distance we suddenly are too close to something and at the same time too far from the thing that you're confronting because of how difficult it is to understand it so it is an intimate because of its intimacy it can be uncomfortable even though it is a foreign experience but it is also intimate and the lessons this appendix is also about the lessons we can learn from theatrical displays of madness about the psychology of everyday life i have read the book twice so far and i'm not sure whether i'll read another book by adam phillips next or whether i'll just read this book one more time and the third option is going to shakespeare i would recommend missing out to you if you are interested in psychoanalysis especially if you are familiar already with freud and the khan to some extent if you are not familiar with freud a better place to begin perhaps would be the penguin freud reader which is also edited by adam phillips all right that's all thank you very much for your attention if you would like to join my patreon reading group or support the production of these videos please visit my patreon page otherwise i will speak with you in the next video

Channel: Davood Gozli

Views: 253

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Theoretical Psychology, Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Psychology, Philosophy of Psychology, Applied Psychology, Philosophy, Davood Gozli, Book Reviews, Books, Booktube, Philosophy of Education, YouTubing, Bildung, Taste

Id: AxN7jc5eWgs

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021