Three Stars for Adam Phillips.

If things go right for us at life’s start, bonding with mother is our first important experience. Mom can figure out what we need, what we want, and Mom can satisfy us. According to eminent British analyst Adam Phillips, however (in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life), attachment to mother leads inevitably to a next experience, disappointment or frustration. Mom cannot maintain a perfect record, she eventually lets us down, and we resent that profoundly.

Frustration can hobble us, can make later attachments problematic, can determine what kind of people we become, what kind of lives we go on to ‘enjoy.’ And it leaves us with the dream of a ‘wished-for’ life where we get everything we want, the life we cannot have.

“The experiences described in this book,” Phillips says, “of not getting it, of getting away with it, and of getting out of it are all chapters in our unlived lives. . .” (pp. 12-13). There are people we don’t get, people who don’t get us, people we cannot bond with. Other people get us too well and won’t let us get away with a thing, while they themselves are getting away with all manner of outrage, never getting caught. Sometimes we need to leave home or otherwise get away from it all in search of that other life that calls us so powerfully. “Sometimes, perhaps more often than we realize,” Phillips observes, “we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than about the experiences we do have” (pp. 74-75).

Phillips rambles a lot, speculates much, returns to go over old ground with a changed angle of vision, devotes many pages to King Lear and other literary case studies, as his spirit moves him. To my mind he leaves a major gap by not looking into the positive side of ‘getting away with something,’ as we feel when we enter a new field of activity in our lives short of confidence at the start. Even top-line funny people like Billy Crystal can feel at the end of long, successful careers that they’ve been getting away with something the whole time. And that’s part of their reward.

But across the span of the book Phillips delivers a grand harvest of provocative insights — those moments when everything lights up keep you going until the end.