Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

The child wants to be reassured that there is an enlivening future; the adult wants to be reassured that there isn’t. The child’s desire is to get out of childhood, the adult’s desire is to get out of wanting to change.

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,

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

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.

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.

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.

Cavell intimates that we are always looking for an alternative to changing, to being, as he puts it, exposed to change. The frustration scene – which goes back a long way – is the scene of transformation. Everything depends on what we would rather do than change.

So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments.

if other people frustrate us the right amount, they become real to us, that is, people with whom we can exchange something; if they frustrate us too much, they become too real, that is, persecutory, people we have to do harm to; if they frustrate us too little, they become idealized, imaginary characters, the people of our wishes; if they frustrate