On Giving Up

“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. Agent: Amy Rennert, Amy Rennert Agency. (Mar.)