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.

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

Our doubts tend to be about whether we can get the satisfactions that we seek, not about the nature of these satisfactions.

The object of desire may be a political ideal, a personal ambition or a person, but we mind the gap; between us and them, between ourselves as wanting, and lacking, and ourselves as defeated and abject, or not; between the dependent self and what it depends on. And adjustments can be made to narrow the gap or to avoid it, which are all variations o

desire always comes with this picture attached; though it is often a tacit picture, as it were, an unconscious one.

As though some kinds of knowledge – call them wishful fantasies of satisfaction – were both the preconditions for satisfaction and a satisfaction in their own right; as though certain knowledge was the object of desire. And if this object of desire was a person, our picture of satisfaction would be of some kind of certainty in our relation to them,

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

In what Freud called ‘primary process thinking,’ the wish is conceived of as gratified, it comes in gratifying form; in ‘secondary process thinking,’ reality is taken into account.

We have to be attentive, in other words, to what we use fantasy to do; whether it becomes, as we say, an end in itself.