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The psychoanalytic community has received Stephen Grosz's book, The Examined Life with uncommon warmth, appreciation, and even gratitude. The book has been highlighted on various psychoanalytic list serves. Journals have been eager to review it.
Grosz, a psychoanalyst trained at the British Society, richly deserves this attention. The Examined Life is a beautifully written, affirmative, and nuanced account of a professional life in service to psychoanalytic healing.
Like Robert Linder's classic, The Fifty Minute Hour and others of its genre, Grosz's text introduces readers to the clinical consulting room. His message, delivered in 251 pages, is simple and straightforward. Each of the 31 elegantly spare chapters focuses on a single patient. Grosz uses his clinical exchanges to show that emotional engagement, in a psychoanalytic context, over time, can help people to navigate extremity, develop trust in themselves, engage more fully in the present, and find pleasure in their bodies. This is possible, he suggests, despite the inherent limits of human life, and the failings of the social communities and families in which most of us grow up.
Psychoanalysts, of course, have always said similar things. Grosz does so exceptionally well. But the appeal of his book, I think, runs deeper.
The Examined Life has appeared at a crucial juncture. The implementation of the Affordable Care Act has ushered in a period of profound uncertainty, as clinicians of all stripes assess what the changing regulations and shifting societal expectations, including those from patients, will mean for independent practice, in general, and for psychoanalytic treatment, in particular. The Affordable Care Act is designed, in fact, to reshape the American health care environment, from insurance reimbursement to the boundaries between disciplines. The policy conversation, for example, is increasingly focused on the integration of “behavioral health” and primary care.
In this context, Grosz's book offers balla