Missing Out is a meditation on reality and opportunity by Adam Phillips, Britain's pre-eminent psychoanalyst.

We all have two lives - the life we live and the life of our fantasies. But it is the life unlived - the person we have failed to be - that can trouble and even haunt us. In Missing Out acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips delves into the gap between who we are and who we are not, to discover whether not getting what we want may be the unlikely key to the fully lived life.

With his trademark combination of open-minded enquiry and exhilarating argument, drawing primarily on the twin worlds of literature and psychoanalysis, Phillips will delight readers old and new in this much-anticipated book.

In Missing Out acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips delves into the gap between who we are and who we are not, to discover whether not getting what we want may be the unlikely key to the fully lived life.


About the Author
Adam Phillips, formerly Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital, London, is a practising psychoanalyst and a visiting professor in the English department at the University of York. He is the author of numerous works of psychoanalysis and literary criticism, including most recently On Wanting to Change, Attention Seeking, In Writing, Unforbidden Pleasures and Missing Out. He is General Editor of the Penguin Modern Classics Freud translations, and a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews
The best living essayist writing in English
Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored * Observer *
He's brilliant
Phillips radiates infectious charm * Sunday Times *
Playfully digressive style... He is the finest living decipherer of affective life [and] the Bob Dylan of psychoanalysis * Daily Telegraph *
'Phillipsian' would evoke a vivid, paradoxical style that led you to think that you had picked up an idea by the head, only to find you were holding it by the tail. * The Guardian *
Phillips is a wonderful writer, his prose limpid and exact * Sunday Times *
His prose is always elegant... such lively intelligence wins over the reader and makes Phillips's work addictive
Praise for Adam Phillips * -- *
Reading Phillips, you may be amused, vexed, dazzled. But the one thing you will never be is bored * Observer *
Phillips radiates infectious charm * Sunday Times *
His writing is a lively source of provocation, repetition, self-renewal * Scotsman *



Book Information
ISBN 9780141031811
Author Adam Phillips
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 159g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 14mm