Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

‘Knowledge liberates,’ Isaiah Berlin writes in his ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, ‘not by offering us more open possibilities amongst which we can make our choice, but by preserving us from the frustration of attempting the impossible.’

In this story, self-knowledge is the precondition for satisfaction. And then, in this same culture, we are also encouraged to believe, by psychoanalysis, that such recognition of what we need and want, were it possible, would be something we couldn’t tolerate;

What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing – nothing comes of nothing – but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a

Lacan calls our ‘passion for ignorance’ and what Freud described, rather less grandly, as our wish not to know about the things that we suffer from (as though not knowing about them diminishes our suffering, which is a tribute in itself to our investment in knowing).

Fantasy is the medium in which we jump to conclusions. And the conclusions we jump to are about satisfaction, and are themselves satisfying.

The hero is not the person who plays by the rules but the person who doesn’t; that courage means whatever you have to do to win; that the honourable thing could be to do what you wish; and the only thing that matters about a wish is that you are successful in realizing it.

(the most satisfying pleasures are the surprising ones, the ones that can’t be engineered).

it is disillusionment that leads the desiring individual to reality. His first recourse, faced with his frustration, is to attempt to satisfy himself, in fantasy, with a perfect, non-frustrating figure; when this fails, his only recourse is to reality. The failure of an initial wished-for satisfaction leads to the possibility of a more realistic sa

(frustration is optimistic in the sense that it believes that what is wanted is available, so we might talk about frustration as a form of faith).