The Examined Life

Listening for Clues to Mind’s Mysteries

‘The Examined Life’ Describes Psychoanalysis’s Power

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: July 8, 2013

Freud’s famous case studies, like Dora, the Wolf Man, Little Hans and the Rat Man, are psychoanalytic readings, suspenseful detective stories and elliptical narratives that have all the drama and contradictions of modernist fiction. Not only is Freud a powerful writer, but his methodology and insights also have a lot in common with literary criticism and novelistic architecture. His patient portraits showcase his skills both as a critic, intent on deconstructing his subjects’ lives, and as a masterly storyteller, adept at using unreliable narrators to explore the mysteries of love and sex and death. It’s no coincidence that he liked to write about characters from Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen and Sophocles (yes, Oedipus), or that he paid so much attention to the language and imagery employed by his patients.

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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

THE EXAMINED LIFE

How We Lose and Find Ourselves

By Stephen Grosz

225 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.

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Bettina von Zwehl

Stephen Grosz

“The Examined Life,” by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz — who teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalytic Unit at University College London — shares the best literary qualities of Freud’s most persuasive work.

The book’s unfortunate title and chapter headings (“On not being in a couple,” “Why parents envy their children,” “How lovesickness keeps us from love”) give the false impression that this is some sort of cheesy self-help book. It’s not. It is, rather, an insightful and beautifully written book about the process of psychoanalysis, and the ways people’s efforts to connect the past, present and future reflect their capacity to change. The book distills the author’s 25 years of work as a psychoanalyst and more than 50,000 hours of conversation into a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks. They invite us to identify with Mr. Grosz’s patients and their losses and regrets, even as we are made to marvel at the complexities and convolutions of the human mind.

Mr. Grosz quotes Isak Dinesen, who observed that “all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,” and he goes on to argue that stories can help us to make sense of our lives, but that if “we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us — we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”

To protect his patients’ confidentiality, Mr. Grosz says he has “changed names and altered all identifying particulars.” Some have predicaments that will sound immediately familiar to many of us: a woman reluctant to give up hope that her commitment-phobic boyfriend will marry her; a man, uncomfortable with intimacy and emotional dependence, finds that he is genuinely happier on his own (he asks Mr. Grosz if he can see him occasionally, when he needs to, but not on a regular basis); a girl whose skill in living up to her parents’ expectations of good behavior and academic achievement “did not prevent the development of her substantial intellectual abilities” but slowed her emotional development.

Other case studies have a more surreal, fablelike quality. There’s a man who obsessively fantasizes about an imaginary house he owns in France, sketching floor plans in his head, visualizing different colors of paint in one room, a larger doorway in another. And there’s a man who seems willfully intent on boring everyone around him, including dates, colleagues — and yes, Mr. Grosz; apparently, it’s an aggressive way of “controlling, and excluding, others,” and his avoidance of dealing with his feelings reminds Mr. Grosz of the character Hamm in Beckett’s “Endgame,” who says: “Absent, always. It all happened without me.”

Like Freud, Mr. Grosz is fond of literary allusions, and he’s nimble at excavating the psychological subtext of literary classics. He reads Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as “a story about an extraordinary psychological transformation.” One of the lessons it teaches, he argues, is that “Scrooge can’t redo his past, nor can he be certain of the future. Waking on Christmas morning, thinking in a new way, he can change his present — change can only take place in the here and now. This is important because trying to change the past can leave us feeling helpless, depressed.”

Like many of Mr. Grosz’s observations, this echoes Kierkegaard’s definition of “the unhappiest man” as someone incapable of living in the present, dwelling instead in past memory or future hope. Mr. Grosz writes about a woman who’s so caught up in imagining the future — her father being at her wedding, getting a home near her boyfriend’s parents — that she’s in denial about the depressing reality of her relationship with the boyfriend. And he writes about a compulsive liar who seems to be, unconsciously, recreating the relationship he had with his mother when he was a boy. (He lied about wetting his bed, and she silently conspired with him to cover it up.)

In recounting his patients’ stories, Mr. Grosz is candid about his role in the process of analysis: he worries about projecting his difficulties with a girlfriend onto his interpretation of a patient’s problem coming to terms with her husband’s apparent infidelity; and he monitors his feelings of detachment when dealing with a patient who’s out of touch with his emotions.

Mr. Grosz notices the language his patients employ — he detects a tone of condescension in a woman who refers to her husband as “sweetie.” He is prone to seeing loss everywhere: success, he suggests, can make a person feel cut off from colleagues and the past; marriage can make someone feel as if other avenues of possibility had been closed. But he is never tendentious, and he does not try, like Freud, to view everything — even the most existential of dilemmas — through an insistently sexual prism. He writes with enormous empathy for his patients, gently encouraging them to recognize patterns in their lives, while hearing out their own theories and concerns. He reassures one patient that he will face all her problems with her, and he promises a seriously ill patient that he will visit him in the hospital for his regular sessions, five times a week.

Being a psychoanalyst, Mr. Grosz writes, means spending his workdays “alone with another person, thinking — trying to be present.” He is a “tour guide — part detective, part translator” — an editor who helps his patients connect the dots of their stories, helping them to make sense of their lives, or, at the very least, assuring them that they are “alive in the mind of another.” With this deeply affecting book, he has done just that — and shared their tales with a wider world.