Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life by Adam Phillips

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25)

The habit of mind that Adam Phillips targets with his new book will be “embarrassingly familiar” to many readers, said Sheila Heti in The New York Times. Many of us worry so much about the lives we have failed or are failing to live that the story each of us fashions about the time we’ve spent on this earth becomes about what we couldn’t or didn’t do. But Phillips, a British psychoanalyst with several books behind him, is a thinker less interested in self-help solutions than in wordplay and paradox. “He doesn’t argue in a linear fashion, but nestles ideas within ideas, like Russian dolls.” You might even suspect that he believes the best thing he can do to help us grapple with the subject of human frustration is to frustrate our desire for a clear takeaway.

Blame “the language of psychoanalysis itself” for such cloudiness, said Jesse Singal in The Boston Globe. Though contemporary psychology tends to speak of neural connections and behavior modification, Phillips belongs to an older tradition, when digging for the root causes of psychological distress was an “elliptical, discursive” exercise. Still, he’s packed this slim work with provocative ideas. In one late section, “On Getting Out of It,” he writes that “there is no more fundamental picture of the human subject than as a creature trying to get out of something” and suggests that the “something” we hope to escape is human nature itself. The thought turns in on itself, yet he uses it to develop “a wonderfully concise appeal for presentness.”

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“Sometimes you feel that the points he’s making are more ingenious than true,” said Christina Patterson in The Independent (U.K.). Even so, he’ll make you think differently about our endless need to be in the know, to feel that we’re “getting it.” He uses Shakespeare’s Othello to show why the quest for complete certainty can be enormously destructive. He also warns against wasting intellectual energy trying to “get” another person, because no person can be fully understood. Perhaps no reader alive will “get” Missing Out in its entirety either. When you’re inside its pages, you persistently feel as if you’re “just getting a grip on something that’s slipping away.” But that’s fitting. Though Phillips fails to provide any clear new path for us to follow, he creates the sense that we’ve caught a true glimpse of “the real, messy, and never knowable human heart.”