The Examined Life
How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:2nd Jan '14
Should be back in stock very soon
Longlisted for the Guardian first book award, a Sunday Times bestseller and Radio 4 Book of the Week. 'Marvellous' (The Times), 'Excellent' (Guardian), 'Completely magical' (Mail on Sunday)
Reveals how the art of insight can illuminate the most complicated, confounding and human of experiences. This title includes stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief.
**SUNDAY TIMES BESTELLER**
This book is about learning to live.
Echoing Socrates' statement that the unexamined life not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws on his twenty-five years of work and more than 50,000 hours of conversations to form a collection of beautifully rendered tales that illuminate the human experience.
These are stories about everyday lives: from a woman who finds herself daydreaming as she returns home from a business trip to a young man loses his wallet, to the more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer and the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer. The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.
'A captivating journey... These are universal themes, insights into an emotional world we inhabit, often with equal difficulty. A wonderful book' Sunday Times
I was enthralled… profound and moving, packed large ideas into a slim volume -- Lucy Lethbridge * Observer Books of the Year *
With deceptive simplicity and gentle wisdom, Grosz teases out a lesson or chases down a fugitive insight. I have distrusted psychoanalysis for years, but I would leap onto Grosz’s couch -- James McConnachie * The Sunday Times Books of the Year *
This moving book of patient portraits by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz will make the reader think of Freud’s keenly observed and literary-minded case studies. Writing with sympathy and insight, Mr Grosz distils 25 years of work into a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks -- Michiko Kakutani * New York Times *
The success of The Examined Life by the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz has, I think, relatively little to do with his clinical know-how; it rests, as Freud's did, on his story-telling abilities -- Rachel Cooke * Observer *
Grosz is a superb storyteller and tells lots of his patients' stories with sensitivity, but also with great acuity. You might keep thinking you recognise things about people you know -- William Leith * Evening Standard *
- Winner of Publishers Publicity Circle Awards: Hardback Non-Fiction 2014 (UK)
- Long-listed for Guardian First Book Award 2013 (UK)
ISBN: 9780099549031
Dimensions: 196mm x 128mm x 22mm
Weight: 180g
240 pages