On Giving Up

by Adam Phillips Narrated by Liam Price

Overview

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?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

[Phillips’s] therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically. . . Phillips’s way to perform these sleights of compositional magic is via style . . . I’m drawn to this aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us.”

—Thomas Larson, The Rumpus

“A wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had.”

—Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post

“[Phillips is] like a flashlight in that his illuminating beam heightens my awareness of the dark . . . I drank [his] words like a tonic.”

—Dan Piepenbring, Harper’s Magazine

“Phillips has rendered the term ‘giving up’ spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact . . . Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are . . . The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book.”

—Sarah Moorhouse, Los Angeles Review of Books

“One of the most arresting things about Adam Phillips’s work is how it resists easy summary, dissolving into a trace memory the moment you try to describe it. . . . Phillips doesn’t try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that’s what we really believe, and how we can be sure.”

—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (An Editors' Choice)

“Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud—not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud’s language . . . The connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants.”

—Ron Slate, On the Seawall

“If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips’ late style, we have a lot to look forward to.”

—Booklist

“A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

2024-01-18
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940195774516
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/28/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged