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How can we thrive when the world is falling apart? Or to put it another way, using a question posed in Stephen Frosh's remarkable new book, how can we stay real and connected during challenging times? This is an immensely scholarly and wide-ranging book. Frosh is a deep thinker—very well-read in the fields of psychotherapy, literature, and geopolitical history. He is not partisan—offering many ways of seeing past events and present crises and iniquities from many angles. (Reading the book is rather like listening to a to- and-fro conversation between several very interesting people.)
Each chapter in How to be Real deals with an important topic, always informed by the central question of how to be real. The subjects covered include childhood, hate in its many forms, defending ourselves against reality, ghosts and ancestors, psychopolitical reality and endurance. Frosh takes us to theories that we know well—for instance, on childhood development, hate, and mourning. But he subtly invites the reader to look at them anew and, importantly, think about their relevance today in a world of challenging times. Sometimes I wished for less complexity and needed to rest with and slowly digest some of the seminal points. It is not a book to read quickly, but one to turn back to in order to deepen into a subject.
In what follows, I will single out a number of topics that have both individual/intrapsychic and global, systemic relevance: hate; the unmourned and intergenerational trauma; and the confusing, much discussed arena of sex, gender, and sexuality. But first a brief mention of the Preface which immediately grabbed my attention and made me keen to continue. After drafting the book, Frosh asked AI to write a Preface in the style of Stephen Frosh. The result astounded him. He said that he wondered why he had bothered to write the book at all, and noted that “the irony of AI describing what it means to be real will not escape anybody”, for “being real demands being connected and h