For anyone who has ever bemoaned the dismal lack of excellent writing about contemporary psychoanalysis (and there are some of us, though not as many as there should be), this plain-looking book with its austere title arrives like a box of chocolates.
Thirty-one elegantly presented chapters which, when you bite into them, each reveals something sweet, rich or crunchy. Every one of these case histories bears repeating. All offer worthwhile insights. Grosz has worked as a psychoanalyst, privately and in the NHS, for 25 years. These are the patients, families and relationships and situations that have stayed with him. His first book is an account of his life's work so far.
It opens with "a patient who shocked me" by faking his own death, and there are more shocks ahead. One man is introduced as a "pathological liar", a stranger on a plane starts a conversation by saying she is on her way to visit the mother who cut her off. A married father-of-four announces at his first appointment that he is thinking of coming out, aged 71, while a woman who has just celebrated her 50th birthday realises a sexy dream that bothered her was about her son.
But the stories that stay longest in the mind are those where Grosz himself is most deeply engaged. With good reason, he fights shy of jargon and for most of the book he does an admirable job of translating ideas derived from decades of theory as well as practice into plain words. (It's a mystery as to why more psychoanalysts are not good at this, when offering interpretations in language even children can grasp is their job. But putting such deeply private material in a book for a general audience is ethically tricky and puts others off: even with identities disguised, Grosz's patients must know who they are.)
Bit by bit, he introduces terms such as splitting ("one way we have of getting rid of self-knowledge"), envy that is "unconscious: furtive, resistant to investigation", and, finally, "transference: how we all construct each other according to early blueprints".
In daily life, transference might help us think about why a woman abused in childhood may find herself choosing abusive partners, or why those born into privilege so often hang on to it. In psychoanalysis, transference is the whole point, and what sets it apart from even the most thoughtful counselling or advice. In order to change, we must access the unconscious feelings and memories that have shaped us. The analyst is the partner in this process.
With Anthony, who at 29 has been diagnosed with HIV and begins sleeping through his sessions, Grosz finds himself losing all sense of time: "whole sessions could go by in what felt like minutes, or just the opposite". In "Through Silence", my favourite piece of writing here, they together come to understand these supervised naps as a kind of rehearsal for death.
In "How anger can keep us from sadness", Grosz describes being spat at every day for a year and a half by a nine-year-old boy until, desperate to make it stop, he seeks advice from an eminent colleague. She helps him see how he is complicit in the spitting and the rage it produces because he cannot face the truth. Analyst and patient are locked in a pretence that if only the boy would try harder he could get well.
"On being boring" does a fantastic job of showing how even boredom is worth thinking about: how boring others (including your analyst) can be a means of attacking them. Another piece, "A passion for ignorance", describes the author's frustration with a young woman who chooses not to notice that her lover is a cheat. "On being a patient" recounts a lunch with a friend who talks through the anxious etiquette of the doorstep, the waiting-room and the couch. Elsewhere, and lest we forget these conversations must be paid for, we learn of unpaid bills.
Most of these pieces build to a breakthrough or solution (many began life as magazine columns). But the author does show how hard-won such moments are. He gives a real (and rare) sense of the texture of analysis, of the weeks and months filled only with frustration, of the missed sessions, tedious repetitions and fruitless guessing as to what is going on. And he makes a point of contrasting all this effort with pop psychology platitudes such as the five stages of grief.
"Think about the impasse," Grosz's colleague tells him of the spitting boy. "You know that when there's a deadlock it's usually because the impasse serves some function for both the patient and the analyst. Think of the deadlock as an obstacle that the two of you have created. What purpose does it serve you?"
Psychoanalysis is by definition indigestible. It is an analyst's job to tell you things you would rather not think or hear. Critics cavil at the Freudian idea of "resistance" because it can be used as a shield against criticism, but anyone who has spent any time in a consulting room will tell you there are times when there is literally nowhere you would less like to be than on the couch.
When Grosz hears one patient use the term "sweetie" of the husband she no longer desires, he defines it as "sugar-coated hate". When I liken The Examined Life to good chocolate, I mean it as a compliment. Grosz's book should give confidence to all psychoanalytic therapists that their work, much more remote from ordinary social interactions than most talking therapies, can be made perfectly accessible and even tempting to anyone who can read.
