Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life

living as if missing the point – having the courage of one’s naivety – could also be a point.

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.

The ego in the Freudian story – ourselves as we prefer to be seen – is like a picture with a frame around it, and the function of the frame is to keep the picture intact.

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.

From this point of view we are, in Wittgenstein’s bewitching term, ‘bewitched’ by getting it; and that means bewitched by a picture of ourselves as conspirators or accomplices or know-alls.

Only someone who gives you satisfaction can give you frustration.

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

We have been educated to think of language, and of people, as something we can get, and in what might be called the fullest sense of the word. Getting it, or not getting it – both the experience, which is acute, and the phrase, which seems not to be – reminds us of the investment we are brought up to have in understanding as a measure of intimacy a

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.