Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

Freud’s work is best read as a long elegy for the intelligibility of our lives. We make sense of our lives in order to be free not to have to make sense.

he is left feeling that his agency, or rather his desire, is confused or compromised, or even stolen from him;

All tyrannies involve the supposedly perfect understanding of someone else’s needs.

We never, in other words, recover from our first false solution to feeling frustrated – the inventing of an ideal object of desire with whom we will never feel the frustration we fear. The ideal person in our minds becomes a refuge from realer exchanges with realer people.

Freud calls ‘repression’ is a way of getting into something by getting out of it (the neurotic keeps arriving at the place he is trying to escape from; he can get to his destination only by trying to avoid it). Repression is what we do with the experiences that we cannot let ourselves have. We set them aside so as not to be troubled by them again.

The ambiguity of the phrase is partly to do with the odd picture of freedom it contains. An exhilaration masks a fear.

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.

And reality matters because it is the only thing that can satisfy us.

but first wishfully (in fantasy) and then in reality, if one is lucky.