By Adam Phillips
Psychoanalytic reflections on renunciation and desire
Subject
Themes
Giving up occupies a peculiar position in human experience. The phrase refers both to healthy renunciations (smoking, excess) and to despair or defeat. This ambiguity reveals a fundamental tension: people sacrifice things believing change is possible, yet also give up when convinced change is impossible. Modern life demands constant self-improvement through sacrifice, yet beneath this lies a pervasive sense that life might not be worth the struggle. Political disillusionment, relationship failures, and demands for consensus create a climate where hatred and prejudice sustain many people.
Giving up occupies a peculiar position in human experience. The phrase refers both to healthy renunciations (smoking, excess) and to despair or defeat. This ambiguity reveals a fundamental tension: people sacrifice things believing change is possible, yet also give up when convinced change is…
Adam Phillips's On Giving Up represents a culmination of decades of psychoanalytic writing that has consistently resisted the consolations of theory whilst insisting on the value of sustained attention to human ambivalence. Published in 2024, the work emerges from a particular moment in contemporary…
Sacrifice operates as the currency of human intention, yet its economy remains fundamentally opaque. When something is relinquished, an imagined exchange occurs: loss traded for anticipated gain. This transaction involves futures that cannot be predicted or controlled, making sacrifice…
What must be surrendered to feel alive? This question presupposes that aliveness itself constitutes an issue requiring assessment and potential sacrifice. Feeling fully alive might demand relinquishing habitual deadening tactics, the daily anaesthesias making life seemingly liveable. Yet profound…
Being left out constitutes fundamental human experience, shaping identity and desire from inception. Kafka's Olympic swimmer who cannot swim epitomizes paradoxical relationship to achievement and belonging. The champion has won yet lacks the very capacity defining the victory. Everyone has been left…
To be found wanting means to be found lacking in something. In traditional accounts, frustration is key to desire; to want something is to feel its absence. Registering lack seems the precondition for pleasure or satisfaction. In this story, frustration constitutes necessary precondition for any…
Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, set in Vienna before the First World War, depicts aristocratic-bourgeois echelons attempting to devise anniversary celebration adequate to rival Prussian festivities. The yearning to locate higher purpose for a lapsed, mongrel empire for which no such thing…
When people ordinarily say they are giving up, they usually refer to smoking, alcohol, chocolate, or other anaesthetic pleasures of everyday life, not suicide. Giving up certain things may be good, yet the idea of someone just giving up is never appealing. Like alcoholics who need everybody to…
Kafka writes that from a certain point there is no more turning back, and that is the point that must be reached. This suggests either that there is always the temptation to give up, or more suggestively that there is always the temptation to turn back, to turn round: to go back to the past, to the…
What must be surrendered to feel alive? Answering this question requires some sense of what aliveness might mean, of what must be done to feel alive, and how to know when feeling this seemingly obvious thing. It may seem odd to think that feeling alive is not only an issue but requires a sacrifice.…
Kafka once noted in his diary that the advantage of lying on the floor is that there is nowhere else to fall. But this is a freedom from, not a freedom for: freed of the anxiety of falling but saying nothing about what this freedom is to do. Lying on the floor is not the precondition for doing…
Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, set in Vienna before the First World War, depicts aristocratic-bourgeois echelons attempting to devise anniversary celebration adequate to rival Prussian festivities. The yearning to locate higher purpose for a lapsed, mongrel empire for which no such thing…
The final sections address the relationship between loss, belief, and the fundamental question of whether life is worth living. When confronted with loss, particularly the kinds of losses that seem to strip away meaning itself, the question of how to proceed becomes paramount. The Crow nation,…
Giving up occupies a peculiar position in human experience. The phrase refers both to healthy renunciations (smoking, excess) and to despair or defeat. This ambiguity reveals a fundamental tension: people sacrifice things believing change is possible, yet also give up when convinced change is impossible. Modern life demands constant self-improvement through sacrifice, yet beneath this lies a pervasive sense that life might not be worth the struggle. Political disillusionment, relationship failures, and demands for consensus create a climate where hatred and prejudice sustain many people.