Review: Tom Mooney
Stephen Grosz may not be the best known psychoanalyst in Britain, though that might change, but he certainly appears to be the most read, courtesy of a weekly magazine column and a new book, the Examined Life, How We Lose and Fine Ourselves, which is selling remarkably well across the water.
He is, naturally, not as well known here, though not among readers of what is probably the finest daily newspaper in the world, The Financial Times, for whom Grosz has been contributing his erudite but reader-friendly analyses to its Saturday magazine for a number of years.
The book therefore, for someone who has been smitten by his style for some time, contains few surprises, though I suspect the individual chapters are extensions of the original articles in most cases.
However, Grosz is always a pleasure to read, and he wisely arranges the chapters into Beginnings, Telling Lies, Loving, Changing and Leaving.
Admittedly, before encountering Grosz, I had been sceptical about psychoanalysts, who appear to be down the pecking order from psychiatrists and psychologists, having once commissioned an ‘analyst’ to write a weekly column for this newspaper in the wake of a spate of suicides in the Slaney.
It turned out that the analyst was anything but, had merely plagiarised stuff from the Internet, and was in fact a serial adulterer, who had trained in Canada as a baker, and had duped the legal profession in the South East for years. His life, for he is not yet reunited with his Maker, and he is entirely unrepentant, is a movie in the making.
Grosz’s approach is disarming: he doesn’t ask too many questions, or rather he asks only the most relevant and, week after week, or month after month, people from all walks of life, with all manner of neurosis, spill the beans of their past.
Grosze has said that his book, which you will read in two days, so gripping are the 30 essays, is about the desire of people to talk about themselves, and to be understood. Analysis comes across as a magical process. ‘We tap, we listen.’ A recommendable read, especially if your mum is buried under the floorboards.
