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It is unusual for a book about psychoanalysis to become both a best seller in London and a New York Times Notable Book. But then The Examined Life is an unusual book. Praised in the daily New York Times, it went on to develop a following in America. But this book deserves to be read not only by an informed public but by analysts as well. Its author, Stephen Grosz, is an analyst who practices in London and teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis there. The book consists of short narratives that distill twenty-five years of work and fifty thousand hours of conversation—that special conversation we conduct in psychoanalytic practice.
Deceptively simple, the narratives illuminate questions of technique, of working with dreams, and of countertransference, and repeatedly display the wisdom of the maxim that we approach each hour with negative capability—that often invoked but hard-to-practice state of openness to the unknown. The book is divided into five sections: Beginnings, Telling Lies, Loving, Changing, and Leaving. Grosz notes in his preface that as this is a book about change, it is inevitably a book about loss, the corollary of meaningful change.
The first of these stories, as he calls the case summaries that make up the book, hooks us with the opening sentence: “I want to tell you a story about a patient who shocked me” (p. 1). He recounts the early days of opening his practice and the referrals, often more difficult cases, sent to him by senior analysts. One of these, Peter, a young man of twenty-seven, was referred after a serious suicide attempt. The two worked together for a period of time in which it emerged that Peter had a pattern of engaging with people for a while, only to withdraw and turn on them. Inevitably this happened in the analysis too, and after a particularly tumultuous week