Book title: Missing Out

Author: Adam Phillips

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 224

Price: Rs 699

Two books, of roughly the same weight and feel in one’s hands, relieved trauma of inadequately deodorized underarms in the Metro this summer — Geoff Dyer’s Zona and Adam Phillips’s Missing Out. Both of them have alluring subtitles — “A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room” and “In Praise of the Unlived Life” respectively. Both are written by attractively uncategorizable, middle-aged Englishmen who manage to sound refreshingly young without being vain. Reading both books feels like engaging in a conversation with their writers; each is a voice in a room — talking, but listening too.

The texture of Phillips’s writing is densely allusive, while his prose sinuously follows the loops and shocks of working through an idea or observation without ever losing, and loosening, the thread of lucidity. There are no concessions made to the difficulty of what is being thought through. But there is no jargon either — remarkable in a writer who works the grey zone between two cant-driven disciplines, psychoanalysis and literary criticism. This marginality to disciplines, discourses and institutions that are necessarily ambivalent about their own authority is what Phillips and Dyer — both students of English — also have in common, formed to some extent by the essays-and-conversation mix of openness and rigour in the Oxford tutorial system.

For Phillips, psychoanalysis is most true to itself (and to its founder’s anxieties) when it looks beyond the “romance of cure” and the goal of self-knowledge to ponder its own redundancy as a science, opening itself up, instead, to a freer association with the therapeutic powers of literature and the other arts (including the arts of conversation). Missing Out spins out its elegies to our unlived lives — the lives that we could have lived, but did not, and which haunt us like the ghostly doubles of the lives we do live — through close readings of King Lear, Othello, Thoreau’s Walden, Larkin’s This Be the Verse, Greene’s The End of the Affair and the OED. Apart from psychoanalytic theorists like Wilfred Bion and, of course, Freud (whose works are read more as literature and philosophy than theory or science), Phillips’s conversations are with philosophers and critics like Stanley Cavell and Barbara Everett.

Yet, the purpose of the book is doggedly practical. How can complicated modern people confront both their need, and their inability, to be happy — indeed, their embarrassment, with happiness? Or, from another, more interesting, direction, how can they manage (and occasionally communicate to others) their “commitment to their own unhappiness”? Is not the “the wish to frustrate ourselves” the most ironic, and the most modern, of our wishes? So, how can we be happy without disappointing ourselves and boring others?