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Stephen Grosz is an American-born psychoanalyst who practices and teaches psychoanalysis in London. Grosz's book, consisting of some 38 case histories, are as much short stories as clinical studies. Reading them, we feel our own connection to the essentials of good literature - careful observation, good narrative, and compelling accounts of human needs and motives. The book is remarkably non-technical and free of jargon—it demonstrates the analyst at work as detective, storyteller, and healer
Grosz has a way of using case material to explain how the mind works without being didactic or simplistic. Puzzling behavior, irrational fears, and fantasies become the departure points for consideration of hidden motives, needs, and feelings. For example, he shows how one patient's platonic relationship with a prostitute was linked to his feelings of loneliness and jealousy after the birth of his first child. Another man's loss of his wallet reveals anxieties triggered by the good news of a career advancement. A young woman's fear that her apartment was booby-trapped by terrorists leads to a consideration of how, in some instances, paranoid fantasies defend against feelings of isolation and others' indifference.
Grosz looks carefully at how people fear change, both in therapy and, more generally, in their lives. A television interview with a 9/11 survivor leads the author to zero in on how our fear of loss (including the loss of our everyday routines) can set up the denial of danger, and ultimately, disastrous losses. Grosz, working with a patient who is both stuck in a bad relationship and unable to accept the loss of her father, suggests that we need to mourn the futures that won't come to pass in order to more fully live in the future. Indeed, the centrality of loss, sadness, and grief run through Grosz's tales from the couch.
Grosz himself is an important, if relatively unobtrusive, character, in these “tales.” He reacts and reveals himself in a considered, non-gratuitous way