In an interview that was published in Bomb magazine a couple of years ago, a journalist admitted to Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst and writer, that though he loved Phillips’s many books and essays, he could “never actually remember anything” that he read in them. Phillips was delighted. “That’s the reading experience I’ve always loved. Certainly, when people say to me, as they often have done, ‘I can’t remember anything afterward,’ I think, Great, that’s the point!”

There is something strange and exciting about hearing a writer say this. But it’s particularly surprising coming from one whose mode is often so pithy. One book, “Monogamy,” was made up entirely of aphorisms, and though aphorisms are meant to be carried around once the book is put down, much like that journalist I’ve managed to remember only one: “A couple is a conspiracy in search of a crime. Sex is often the closest they can get.”

“Missing Out,” Phillips’s 17th book, is his most poetic, paradoxical, repetitive and punning yet; he doesn’t argue in a linear fashion but nestles ideas within ideas, like Russian dolls. The result feels less like a clean literary feat than the underground rumblings that produce literature.

What’s at stake throughout these essays is how we understand the “lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.” Phillips’s clinical practice (he sees patients four days a week and writes on Wednesdays) has shown him that “we live as if we know more about the experiences we don’t have than the experiences we do have.” He refers to these parallel or shadow lives as our “unlived lives,” and says that many of us “spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason” that “they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives.”