Adam Phillips tells his many readers not to worry about what might have been. Photograph by Boo George

Adam Phillips, Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer, dislikes the modern notion that we should all be out there fulfilling our potential, and this is the subject of his new book, “Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Instead of feeling that we should have a better life, he says, we should just live, as gratifyingly as possible, the life we have. Otherwise, we are setting ourselves up for bitterness. What makes us think that we could have been a contender? Yet, in the dark of night, we do think this, and grieve that it wasn’t possible. “And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives,” Phillips writes. “Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless trauma about, the lives we were unable to live.”

He, it would seem, has little reason to mourn his life. After a period of psychoanalytic studies, and a four-year analysis, he joined the staff of Charing Cross Hospital, in London, and was the chief child psychotherapist there for almost a decade before leaving to start his own practice, now headquartered in a large, sunny, book-lined office in fashionable Notting Hill. He is a hipster. He tends to wear dark clothes and pointy boots, and his hair goes every which way. He has an accomplished and good-looking companion, Judith Clark, a costume curator. (Before Clark, he had another accomplished and good-looking companion, the feminist writer Jacqueline Rose. From these two unions, he has three children.) His politics are of the left. Among the many sins with which he taxes his psychoanalytic colleagues, one is greed. In 2003, he told Daphne Merkin, writing for the Times Magazine, that he charged anywhere from zero to about seventy-five dollars per session. He no doubt makes up the rest in royalties. At the age of fifty-eight, he has published seventeen books, not counting the seven that he has edited. He also writes frequently for The Threepenny Review and, especially, for the London Review of Books. He just keeps cranking it out.

And he says he doesn’t fuss over it. I once attended an interview that Paul Holdengräber, the director of the New York Public Library’s lecture series, held with Phillips. Holdengräber asked about his experience of writing. Phillips answered that it came easily. If, in producing a piece, he felt stuck, he just chucked it in the wastebasket. In other ways, too, he takes a relaxed, even antic, view. By now, he doesn’t feel obliged to write his books on his own. (Of his last six, three were co-authored.) Indeed, he doesn’t have to write about psychoanalysis. In 2010, with Judith Clark, he published “The Concise Dictionary of Dress,” which consists mostly of photographs of Clark’s installations at the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with aphorisms by Phillips. But, even when he’s writing alone, about psychoanalysis, he doesn’t feel that he actually has to write a book. As he has explained, he writes some essays and then, trusting that their emergence from his brain at around the same time means that they must be related, publishes them in one volume. So, while some of his books are advertised as collections of essays, that’s what many of his other books are, too. “Missing Out” is in this category. It discusses, at length, not just missing out but “King Lear” and “Othello,” and also includes the text of a lecture that he gave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in 2011, on theatrical representations of madness. Phillips pretty much does any damn thing he pleases.

The first chapter of “Missing Out” is “On Frustration,” in praise of that emotion. Frustration makes people real to us, he says, because, in our lives, they are usually the sources of it. Indeed, frustration makes reality itself real to us. Consider love:

There is a world of difference between erotic and romantic daydream and actually getting together with someone; getting together is a lot more work, and is never exactly what one was hoping for. So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. . . . And this is when it works.

We can find realistic satisfactions, Phillips assures us, but, like most psychoanalytic writers, he doesn’t spend much time suggesting what those might be. His conclusions, at least at this point in the book, seem pessimistic. But psychoanalysis has never promised to make silk purses out of sows’ ears. Cotton purses, maybe.

Which takes Phillips to his second chapter, the best one: “On Not Getting It.” Here he claims that we’re better off not understanding ourselves, or others. If Phillips’s recommendation of frustration is a slap in the face to the human-potential movement, this skepticism regarding understanding goes directly against orthodox psychoanalytic wisdom. That doesn’t worry him: “Perhaps understanding is one thing we can do with each other—something peculiarly bewitching and entrancing—but also something that can be limiting, regressive.” Indeed, it may be risky. “The illusion of knowing another person creates the possibility, the freedom, of not knowing them; to be free, by not knowing them, to do something else with them”—that is, mistreat them, on the basis of our presumed understanding.

But the error Phillips addresses most feelingly is our wish to be understood. This, he says, can be “our most violent form of nostalgia,” a revival of our wish, as infants, to have our mother arrive the instant we cry out from pain or hunger. Phillips was a student of literature until he was lured into psychoanalysis by the writings of D. W. Winnicott, the revered child psychologist of mid-twentieth-century England. One of Winnicott’s main contributions to psychoanalytic thought was his idea of the “good-enough mother,” the mother who sometimes responded promptly to our needs and sometimes didn’t. The beauty of this concept was that it was so widely applicable—most people had that kind of mother—and also that it bestowed some honor on her. (Those mothers typically had other children to care for, plus dinner to cook.) I think that Phillips regards Winnicott’s good-enough mother as not just good enough but the best, because she tells us the truth: on occasion we’ll get satisfaction and on occasion we won’t. We need understanding sometimes, not every time. If we insist on getting it all the time, he asks, “how could we ever be anything other than permanently enraged?”