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The title of this book calls to mind Plato's The Apology, in which Socrates asserts that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. Stephen Grosz, a London psychoanalyst educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, would certainly agree. In this engaging book, Grosz examines the lives and stories of many of his patients, some friends and family, and even a few chance acquaintances. The process leads him to examine his own life and work as a psychoanalyst with children and adults in hospitals, clinics, and private practice. After twenty-five years of experience, Grosz has fascinating stories to tell and rich insights to contribute. In the end, his book becomes an apologia for the value of psychoanalysis. It is a must-read for anyone interested in preserving the practice of analysis at a time when it is often considered ineffective and obsolete.
Grosz divides his book into five sections entitled Beginnings, Telling Lies, Loving, Changing, and Leaving. Each section contains a cluster of brief vignettes of his work with patients or of his experiences with a friend or a family member. One chapter describes an airplane conversation with a woman traveling to meet her mother after a sixteen-year estrangement; in another, Grosz recounts in his spare but eloquent prose a trip with his father, a Holocaust survivor, to his home village in Hungary. All told, there are thirty-one tales, individual variations on the theme of change and loss. In each examined life we observe a human being plumbing the depths of the inner world, uncovering secrets, deconstructing or shoring up defenses. As the subjects lose and find themselves, we are moved to react to their stories and to examine our own lives. We identify with their pain, their joys, and their resistance. As Grosz says of one patient, a young man named ‘Matt’ who ‘had learned at an early age to deaden his feelings and to distrust those who offered him help,’ the truth is that ‘there is a bit of Matt