ESSENTIAL READING
This is the least instructional book on the shelf and possibly the most useful.
There is no framework in it. No steps, no acronyms, nothing to apply on Monday. Stephen Grosz simply tells you about people he sat with, several times a week, sometimes for years, and lets the pattern do the work.
THE BOOK
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves was published in 2013. It collects thirty-one very short pieces, most of them only a few pages, drawn from Grosz's clinical practice. Identifying details are changed.
The pieces are grouped into sections on beginnings, on lying, on loving, on changing and on leaving. Each one describes a person, a problem and what turned out to be underneath it. The turns are rarely what the patient expected and often not what the reader expects either.
A man cannot stop being late. A woman is convinced her husband is having an affair. A boy will not speak. Grosz sets each situation down without comment, follows it and stops. He almost never draws the moral, which is the discipline that makes the book good.
THE AUTHOR
Stephen Grosz is an American-born psychoanalyst who has practiced in London for decades. He has taught at University College London and in the psychoanalysis unit there. By the time he wrote this he had accumulated something in the region of fifty thousand hours in the consulting room.
He was not a writer first. That shows in the best way: the prose is plain and completely unhurried, and there is no apparent interest in appearing clever.
THE CENTRAL IDEA
The recurring finding across the stories is that people are reliably wrong about why they do what they do, and that the wrongness is not random.
The explanation a person offers usually protects something. A man who is always late may believe he is disorganized. It may turn out that lateness is the only form of refusal available to him. A woman certain of her husband's infidelity may be carrying a suspicion that belongs somewhere else entirely. In each case the surface account is not a lie. It is a story that lets the person avoid a harder one.
The second idea, and the one that gives the book its emotional weight, is Grosz's treatment of loss. He argues that a great deal of what looks like stuckness is unfinished grief, and that people frequently prefer a familiar unhappiness to an unfamiliar change because change requires giving something up. Even a bad situation contains a version of yourself that would have to be relinquished.
He is also good on praise. There is a short piece about how constant praise can make a child more anxious rather than more confident, because it teaches them that the adult's attention is contingent on performance. It is two pages and it lands.
WHAT IT IS USEFUL FOR
It is for the reader who has consumed a lot of psychology and has started to sound fluent about themselves without changing much.
Frameworks can become a place to hide. If you can name your attachment style, your archetype and your patterns, you can produce a very sophisticated account of your life that functions exactly like the patient's convenient explanation. Grosz's book is a corrective, because every story is about someone whose account was coherent and wrong.
It is also, more simply, the best available demonstration of what actually happens in psychoanalysis, for anyone curious about that.
READ IT WITH THIS IN MIND
These are case stories, not evidence. Grosz is working within a psychoanalytic tradition whose central claims are difficult to test and which many contemporary psychologists regard skeptically. He is not making empirical arguments and the book should not be read as making them.
It is also worth saying that the book will not solve anything. It is not designed to. Its value is in what it does to your certainty about your own explanations, and that is a slower kind of use.
The short pieces are deceptive, too. It reads quickly and does not deserve to be read quickly.
IF YOU TAKE ONE THING
The reason you gave yourself is not necessarily the reason.
Sitting with that for a while does more than most of what people do in the name of self-improvement.