ON GIVING UP

A British psychoanalyst examines the “essential and far-reaching ambiguity of a simple idea.”

Phillips, author of Unforbidden Pleasures, Becoming Freud, and Attention Seeking, premises his latest book on the notion that giving something up—or giving up on something—is based on beliefs about change. “We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we can’t,” he writes. Underlying that assumption is that life itself is always worth living, an assumption many are questioning at a time when the planet is in dire social, political, and ecological crisis. Turning to writers and thinkers like Kafka for illumination, Phillips suggests the two-sided nature of giving up: “defeatedness and sacrifice, or failure and compromise, or weakness and realism.” At the same time, he also suggests what few discuss. In giving up, humans can take “sadistic pleasure” in such possibilities as suicide, what Camus would call the most “serious” of all philosophical problems. Yet most will choose to carry on, which leads Phillips to ask, “What is worth surviving for?” Darwin would suggest that survival itself is the endgame, while Freud would suggest that it is pleasure. Yet Phillips finds these “answers” to be as reductive as they are problematic. He offers a partial “answer” of his own by building on Freud’s ideas about loss, which is itself at the heart of all forms of giving up. Loss—being forced to reckon with it—is perhaps a catalyst needed to spur both transformation and inventiveness, which is perhaps the one great hope that remains for humankind. Some readers may find the author’s tendency to speak in high-culture abstractions not to their taste. However, those who enjoy heady engagement with ideas from the upper registers of literature, philosophy, and psychology will undoubtedly find this book exhilarating.

A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.