'The Examined Life' Book Review.

Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life is to me one of those books that will stay in my memory for a long time due to it's real-ness and how captivating I found it. I think I read it in about three days. This simple story of just over 200 pages is not quite a 'story' in the narrative sense, but rather a variety of recounts of the interactions between a psychoanalyst (Grosz) and his wide variety of patients over his 25 years of practice. For me, the book spoke many truths about the way we are affected by the people and events of our past and present and some of the concealed feelings behind day to day behaviour. It lead me to think like a psychoanalyst, quietly assessing the personality traits of myself and others, attributing them to a variety of causes and coming to some pretty profound conclusions.

Each short chapter of the book recounts a new person's story under the wider themes of 'Beginnings', 'Telling Lies', 'Loving', 'Changing' and 'Leaving'. Why people can feel in love with people they don't even know, why a little boy with learning difficulties continued to spit in the face of adults around him, why a gay professor didn't realise his sexuality until well into his 70s, and why some feelings of paranoia can protect us from a more dangerous feeling - that nobody cares about us.

An example from the book that I particularly enjoyed was Grosz's story of 'Abby' whose parents had "cut [her] out of their lives" after she had started dating a blonde Catholic, 'Patrick'. Her Jewish father was terribly racist towards her boyfriend (who she eventually married) and her parents went on to ignore all correspondence with their daughter for years at her fathers request, even after the announcement of their first grandchild. This story continued to say that after 16 years Abby discovered that her father had been having an affair all this time with his receptionist -who was blonde and Catholic.

Grosz went on to say how Abby's father's actions towards Patrick could be explained by a concept psychoanalysts call 'splitting'- "an unconscious strategy that aims to keep us ignorant of feelings in ourselves that we are unable to tolerate. Typically, we want to see ourselves as good, and put those aspects of ourselves that we find shameful into another person or group".

Through 'splitting' Abby's father was ultimately directing all disapproval and hatred for his own acts into his daughter dating Patrick. As Abby concludes, "the bigger the front, the bigger the back".

This book provides new ideas on why we, as humans do what we do; and any book that causes you to think in a deeper way and be more understanding of those around you is, in my opinion, undoubtedly worth the read.

-B

*Mosaik takes no credit for any of the images or quotes used in this article*