On Giving Up
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One of The New York Times Critics' Picks of the Year
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.
To give up or not to give up?
The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.
Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.
There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment—an attempt to make a different future.
In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't," observes psychoanalyst Phillips (On Wanting to Change) at the outset of this intermittently insightful analysis. Though he touches on the subject of suicide—the "ultimate giving up"—Phillips writes from the assumption "that life is by definition always worth living," and characterizes giving up as "sacrificing something in the service of something deemed to be better." The book's eight chapters interrogate what this notion might mean for death, wanting, exclusion, intellectual nihilism, loss, and censorship (for instance, what are "censors"—whether external or mental—attempting to protect through exclusion?). Unfortunately, Phillips's discussions are often weighed down by esoteric considerations of Freud and Lacan, as well as his own Freudian interpretations of literary masterpieces. He's at his best when distilling such ideas as psychoanalyst Marion Milner's concept of "narrow attention" versus "wide attention," the former an example of the mind as "questing beast" focusing on "what serves its immediate interests" and ignoring the rest, the latter showing how, without the drive of want, "it became possible to look at the whole at once." Many chapters evolved from previously published essays, which may account for the narrative's jagged feel. It's a scattershot exploration of an original and arresting idea.
