The Examined Life
We are all storytellers - we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen. In his work as a practising psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient. These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.
4.4 out of 5 based on 8 reviews
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Omniscore:
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| Classification |
Non-fiction |
| Genre |
Psychology & Psychiatry |
| Format |
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| Pages |
240 |
| RRP |
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| Date of Publication |
January 2013 |
| ISBN |
978-0701185350 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
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We are all storytellers - we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen. In his work as a practising psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into pure psychological insight, without the jargon. This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient. These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too.
Reviews
The Daily Express
Jane Clinton
“In an intelligent, human and deeply moving book, Grosz guides us through their lives, and preoccupations. The mundane becomes extraordinary, the minutiae the focus. Grosz is listening for the unspoken and the gaps in between. His book celebrates change and the triumphs and tragedies of humanity.”
27/01/2013
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The Mail on Sunday
Craig Brown
“… crystal-clear and completely magical. It is also very accessible. Grosz begins his book, Max Bygraves-style, with the words, ‘I want to tell you a story’, and to some extent it is a jaunty medley of other people’s woes, a sort of SingaLonga- Trauma. But it is also much, much more than that. True, he narrates his case histories with a storyteller’s zest, and they are blessedly free of obscure psycho-jargon. But he preserves their essential mystery by looking at them from an oblique angle, and keeping them open-ended.”
09/02/2013
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The Times
Melissa Katsoulis
“The suspense in each perfectly plotted chapter is so expert that I had to double-check that The Examined Life was not a work of fiction ... This is an elegant, jargon-free expedition into the secret business of our minds written with such wisdom and kindness that even those who think psychoanalysis is bunk might find that lying on a couch being listened to is worthwhile.”
19/01/2013
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The Sunday Times
Robert Collins
“Grosz’s vignettes are so brilliantly put together that they read like pieces of bare, illuminating fiction ... It is [the] combination of tenacious detective work, remarkable compassion and sheer, unending curiosity for the oddities of the human heart that makes these stories utterly captivating.”
06/01/2013
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The Observer
Alexander Linklater
“… in turning people's lives into stories with (at least partial) resolutions, Grosz persuades us to see how the psychoanalytic encounter can help people change – a little – or perhaps accept the ways in which they cannot change. This hardly amounts to a rallying cry, but it is powerful nonetheless. He does not act as advocate for psychoanalysis. He makes his larger case by showing, not telling.”
27/01/2013
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The Spectator
Michael Holroyd
“For British readers there is the occasional off-putting Americanism such as ‘different than’, or the assumption that everyone has a ‘mom’. But Grosz is an able writer, engaging, frank and with many penetrating insights. His short, succinct chapters have both the tension and the satisfaction of miniature detective or mystery stories ... At the end of his acknowledgments Grosz writes that his ‘greatest debt, finally, is to those who cannot be thanked by name — the patients whose lives have shaped this book’. These are his last words and they leave an unwritten and unanswered question over what is nevertheless a stimulating book.”
05/01/2013
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The Guardian
Susanna Rustin
“He gives a real (and rare) sense of the texture of analysis, of the weeks and months filled only with frustration, of the missed sessions, tedious repetitions and fruitless guessing as to what is going on. And he makes a point of contrasting all this effort with pop psychology platitudes such as the five stages of grief.”
18/01/2013
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The New Statesman
Jane Shilling
“As literature, Grosz’s book is intensely readable but lacks the depth of humanity that makes the very best memoir and fiction writing, from Montaigne to Melville, so resonant. As an account of psychoanalytic treatment, it largely ignores the problematic question of the therapist’s role as — on some level — the star of his or her encounter with a patient ... Yet as a reminder of the strangeness of human existence, the myriad ways we find of making ourselves unhappy and the perplexing resourcefulness of the unconscious mind, Grosz’s book is a worthwhile addition to the literature of the examined life.”
03/01/2013
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