Missing Out

Missing Out

In Praise of the Unlived Life

by

Completed: January 1, 2020
★★★

Please see my page on Adam Phillips for more. Some quotes below:

It is the absence of what we need that makes us think, that makes us cross and sad. We have to be aware of what is missing in our lives - even if this obscures both what we already have and what is actually available - because we can survive only if our appetites more or less work for us. Indeed, we have to survive our appetites by making people cooperate with our wanting. We pressurize the world to be there for our benefit.

On Frustration

To frustrate, then, is to, in one way or another, make void a demand made of oneself; to avoid it or to make it as nothing; and it is to deceive the other person either if you have what they want and won’t give it, or if you can create the illusion that you have what they want but are merely refusing to give it. And to be or feel frustrated is to be maddened by having one’s demand negated or avoided or tantalized. In this picture it is as though a contract has been broken; as if one person always has what the other person demands of them and the only question is how to get it….
Clearly, the demand for love, the demand that love be articulated, is something of a special case….
So the issue of entitlement between parents and children, or between lovers, or between friends, can never be straightforward. The entitled are always too knowing.

Knowing what one wants is a way of not exposing oneself to change (or of taking change too much into one’s own hands, subjecting it to one’s will)….

…[A]ddiction is unformulated frustration, frustration too simply met).

There is, though, one ineluctable fact, one experience that is integral to our development, something that is structural to human relations right from the very beginning; and that is, that if someone can satisfy you they can frustrate you. Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration. This, one can say, is something we have all experienced, and go on experiencing. You know someone matters to you if they can frustrate you.

To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want…. A kind of longing may have preceded their arrival, but you have to meet in order to feel the full force of frustration in their absence.

Falling in love, finding your passion, are attempts to locate, to picture, to represent what you unconsciously feel frustrated about, and by. In this sense we are always trying to find, to get a sense of what is missing, what we need, what, in Lacan’s terminology, we lack.

We are tempted, initially, to be self-satisfying creatures, to live in a fantasy world, to live in our minds, but the only satisfactions available are the satisfactions of reality, which are themselves frustrating; but only in the sense that they are disparate from, not in total accord with, our wished-for satisfactions (the most satisfying pleasures are the surprising ones, the ones that can’t be engineered). In this picture we depend on other people for our satisfactions. But the quest for satisfaction begins and ends with a frustration; it is prompted by frustration, by the dawning of need, and it ends with the frustration of never getting exactly what one wanted. How could we ever be anything other than permanently enraged?

On Not Getting It

If it had to be formulated, in brief, we could say that the man or woman of your dreams is the person who both gets you and doesn’t get you in the way you prefer to be got. That is to say, someone who doesn’t treat you only as their favourite joke.

Groups of people tend to be defined, or to define themselves, by the things they all get. Outsiders don’t get it, and if or when they do, it is a shock to the system (as all immigrants know)…. Getting it, or not getting it - both the experience, which is acute, and the phrase, which seems not to be - reminds us of the investment we are brought up to have in understanding as a measure of intimacy and competence; and of how hard a word ‘understanding’ is to understand.

If getting it gives us some kind of pleasure, what are the pleasures of not getting it, of being, as we say, left out or in the dark, or clueless? It can be humiliating to not get it - indeed, I want to suggest that humiliation is always a form of not getting it, and that humiliation sheds a unique and horrifying light on what not getting it might be about…. We need to imagine what a life would be like in which this command [‘you must get it in order to qualify as a member of our group’] had been dropped, a life in which there was nothing to get because what went on between people, what people wanted from each other, couldn’t possibly be phrased in that way. Our lives would not be about getting the joke or the point. Or, to put it slightly differently, there would be other pleasures than the pleasures of humiliation.

There is, in other words, a freedom - a freedom from the tyranny of perfection - in not understanding and in not being understood (understanding is not always the best thing we can do with need). All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.

My supposition is that sometimes - perhaps more often than not - we think ew 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.

On Satisfaction

A picture of satisfaction, we might say then, at least to begin with, is a flight from wanting; a refuge from the rigours and risks of desire; a refuge, in fact, from real satisfaction. In fantasy, in the wishing scene, we leapfrog over the obstacles, or rather we don’t succumb to them…. We fast-forward through the frustrating bits…. Our fantasies of satisfaction - our preconceptions about satisfaction - are where we hide from the possibility of real satisfaction…. Fantasy is the medium in which we jump to conclusions. And the conclusions we jump to are about satisfaction, and are themselves satisfying.

So we have to start imagining desiring not without an object of desire, but without imagining too certainly the satisfactions that might accrue, not being too quick to satisfy ourselves in fantasy; and, when we do, being able to ironize such satisfactions (not take them too literally, or too solemnly). And doing this, of course, affects our imagining of the object of desire and what we can claim to know about it. We would think about a revolution or a wedding very differently if we had too little knowledge of what would occur afterwards, when too little knowledge is what we will always have (this is what the word ‘risk’ is for); or if we acknowledged that what we know about a revolution or a wedding are the wishes it carries.

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