Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

Freud invites us to wonder what relationships would be like if we dropped the idea that they had anything to do with indebtedness or obligation.

Thought is what makes frustration bearable, and frustration makes thought possible.

‘what is it that we want our tropes to do for us?’

he is a writer shrewd enough to know that betrayal only matters because something else matters more.

In the simple pleasure-pain calculus, one is poised between the unsatisfying object from which one must be freed and the preferred, potentially satisfying object that one seeks.

avoiding things is a way of attending to them, of keeping them in mind.

And these, we might say, are two ways of murdering the world: making it impotent or making it unreal. If this was quantifiable we would say that the good life proposed by psychoanalysis is one in which there is just the right amount of frustration.

If thinking is the way to modify it, then attacking one’s capacity to think would be an evasion; failures of imagination would be the unwillingness to bear with frustration.

which getting it is not always the point, in which there is nothing, to all intents and purposes, to get; and our picture of this can be, in adult life, when we are lost in thought, absorbed in something without needing to know why we are absorbed, or indeed what we are absorbed in; or when we dream.