On Giving Up
I think a lot about the fluctuations of belief—the inevitable up and downs of maintaining engagement with something over long periods of time. Most people seem to think that love is unchanging versus merely enduring, that if you’re really passionate about something you wake up excited to do it every day. I don’t believe that’s true. In fact, it set... See more
Ava • belief over time
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.
Adam Phillips • Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unloved life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are th
... See moreAdam Phillips • Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Neither Freud nor Bion doubt that there are satisfactions to be had; what they do doubt, paradoxically, is our capacity, perhaps our desire, to know what they might be and to try to find them.