In 1765 Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent two months on a Swiss island dedicating himself to “my precious far niente” (doing nothing). He loafed about, gathering plants, drifting in a boat, sitting for hours in a “delicious reverie … pleasurably aware of my existence without troubling myself with thought”: an idleness that he later described as the most “complete and perfect happiness” of his life.

Rousseau is one of the heroes of Not Working, alongside Thoreau, Emily Dickinson and a rabbit named Rr that Josh Cohen once briefly looked after. The book opens with Rr shuffling around his hutch, his mindless serenity triggering an empathic recognition in Cohen of his own “secret, self-enclosed blankness”, his frequent bouts of “lapine reverie”. Like Rousseau on his island, Rr does not do, he merely is. His passivity calls out to Cohen, who at various points in his book describes himself as a slob, a slacker, a layabout. As a child he was regularly chastised for laziness; as an adult, every day brings its moment of far niente: “It usually happens at night, when I’m slouched on the sofa … my book lies face down, my shoes are kicked off; next to me are two remote controls, a bowl of peanuts and a half-empty beer bottle … Raising myself from this lethargy … feels like a physical, even a metaphysical disturbance, a violation of cosmic justice.”

“Why should I?” The childish protest is disarming; we picture Cohen’s inner bunny strapped to a treadmill or, worse still, turned into a very different rabbit: the Duracell bunny, whose “clockwork motion” and “dead-eyed grin” makes him a perfect symbol for the relentless busyness of modern life, its “constant, nervous compulsion to activity” that Cohen resents and resists.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Photograph: Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy

Not Working is a polemic against our overwork culture and a meditation on its alternatives. “What, if not work, makes life worth living?” Cohen is a psychoanalyst. Every day his consulting room resounds with stories of unremitting activity, exhaustion, breakdown; “fantasies of a complete cessation of doing”. Some of these storytellers appear in the book, carefully disguised, in company with a host of other anti-workers, actual and fictional, including the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, Homer Simpson and Cohen himself at various phases in his life. The cast is mostly male and grouped into four “inertial types”: the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer, the slacker. Some crash into inertia; others, like Cohen, sink into it. All, it turns out, are risk-takers, since “in resisting work … each type is liable to fall into one or more impasse”: debilitating lassitude, depression, loneliness, boredom. Far niente, in other words, has its price, which for some people, including the three men whose stories Cohen highlights – Andy Warhol, Orson Welles and David Foster Wallace – can be very high.

Warhol yearned for what the Stoics called apatheia (passionlessness), a longing that resulted in a machine-like numbness, a state of “being and feeling nothing”, in which ferocious mechanical activity alternated with inertial collapse: a Duracell bunny with his batteries flat. Welles combined Herculean exertions with lengthy retreats to his bed, which became more frequent as his body and mind gave way under his crazed lifestyle. Foster Wallace’s dazzling literary career was punctuated by periods when he lay slumped in front of the TV struggling with acute depression: a deathly torpidity that terminated in suicide. Cohen types these men differently (Warhol the burnout, Welles the slob, Foster Wallace the slacker) but what is striking about all three is how the flight from hyperactivity into self-destructive inertia involves a move into radical solitude, far niente as malignant isolation.

Solitude has long been associated with depressive enervation. Medieval spiritual solitaries were said to suffer from acedia, a melancholic sluggishness of mind and body. “Be not solitary, be not idle,” the 17th-century scholar Robert Burton counselled in his hugely influential The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Modern psychiatry regards reclusiveness as pathological and many of Cohen’s fellow psychoanalysts concur. He rejects this, turning instead to the alternative tradition, dating back to the Renaissance, that values solitude as a setting for creativity. The postwar analyst Donald Winnicott was an eloquent spokesman for this tradition. For Winnicott “creativity depended on maintaining contact with the ‘still, silent spot’ at the heart of the psyche”: an insight exemplified for Cohen by the famously reclusive Emily Dickinson, whose retirement from society into the “boundless confines of her own room and head” liberated her to produce poetry of dazzling originality. Renouncing sexual love and marriage for the “polar privacy” of her inner life, “in the eyes of the world she was ‘doing nothing’, while in her own mind she was ‘doing everything’, travelling fearlessly to the furthest extremes of possible experience.”

Daydreaming for Dickinson was not a retreat into listless inactivity, but the basis for the highest vocation

In a brilliant set of readings, Cohen shows how this fearless voyaging produced a poetry that moved between shattering images of acedia and ecstatic evocations of unconsummated desire, Dickinson’s “private and invisible glory”. Dreaming and the products of dreaming trumped constraining actuality. “Daydreaming for Dickinson was not a retreat into listless inactivity, but the basis for the highest vocation.”

Cohen’s treatment of Dickinson is revealing. The slobs and slackers that populate Not Working are men after his heart, but it’s the artist who is his ideal, disdaining real-world activity (“prose” was Dickinson’s sniffy label for this) for the life of the imagination. An artist “does nothing”, produces nothing “useful”, and in this she embodies the “sabbatical dimension of us human beings”, the richest part of ourselves. But does this make the artist an “inertial type”?

Emily Dickinson. Photograph: Hulton Getty

In his Confessions Rousseau wrote “The idleness I love is not that of a do-nothing who stays with his arms crossed in totally inactivity,” but “that of a child who is ceaselessly in motion”. Play is also not work, but it is anything but inert. For Winnicott, play was the primal creative experience, the source of all adult creativity. Cohen is keen on Winnicott so it’s interesting that he doesn’t mention it, unlike Tracey Emin who in a 2010 interview described childhood play as the wellspring of her art. In an illuminating discussion of Emin’s My Bed, Cohen praises the work for its powerful portrayal of “inertia and lassitude”. But unlike the inertia of the men he discusses, Emin herself seems to go from strength to strength. Perhaps playing is the secret?

Emin and Dickinson are among the few women who appear in Not Working. We read about their artistic representation of female inertia but meet no female sluggards or layabouts. So what are women doing while men are lazing about? A closer look at Cohen’s favourite idlers – Rousseau, Thoreau, Homer Simpson – gives us a clue. Rousseau’s days of far niente were punctuated by meals prepared by his wife. Thoreau’s laundry was done by his mother. Marge Simpson does the housework while Homer swills beer in front of the TV. What kind of revolution would it take to put Marge in front of the TV while Homer cleans the kitchen?

The battle against overwork has gone on for centuries (joined more recently by feminist protests against the “double shift”). So too have struggles for decent work, decently paid, of the kind that Cohen and I both enjoy. Yet today real-life Marges dash between their homes and their minimum-wage jobs at Asda. Homers do 12-hour stints driving for Uber. If they burn out, as many people do, they often find themselves in food banks. What to do about this?

“Idiorrhythmy” was Roland Barthes’s term for living according to one’s inner rhythms, free from compulsion. Cohen wants us to imagine what such a life would be like. He’s sceptical about agendas for change that fail to do this, arguing that if “the aims of legal, political and economic justice are isolated from the question of what makes a life worth living they are liable to become just another set of items on … a joyless to-do list”. Along with work-related rights we need a right not to work, he argued recently. It’s a utopian argument and no worse for that, although weakened by an ironic dismissal of all political action in favour of slacking and sloth. But Not Working is no revolutionary manifesto. Rather, it’s a highly personal, eloquent reimagining of our lives as a space for far niente in all its unfettered idiosyncrasy, and a valuable reminder of the exorbitant price of a Duracell bunny existence.

• Not Working is published by Granta. To order a copy for £10.99 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.