27 Jan 2014 01:22:02
Though many of these stories are overtly moving, the book's most distinctive pleasure is its portrayal of the psychoanalytic process. "I'd noticed that Lily's voice went up at the end of sentences," Grosz writes. Experiencing this as a pressure to respond to her, Grosz suggests to Lily that she may be trying to gauge whether he agrees; perhaps his laughing at her jokes implies the same need. Lily concedes this, and, as she does so, makes the kind of unconscious association that drives psychoanalysis. As a girl she once sobbed on the phone to her parents, begging them to let her leave boarding school. "When you laugh," she tells Grosz, "I know you see things exactly the way I do… you'd have let me come home."
Sometimes the insights are Grosz's. Abby's father refuses to speak to her after she marries a non-Jewish man – then she discovers he has been having an affair with a Catholic woman himself. Though psychoanalytic theory is notoriously obscure, here Grosz makes it simple: "Splitting," he writes, "is one way we have of getting rid of self-knowledge… Able to locate the problem in Abby, [her father] lost awareness of it in himself."
What makes The Examined Life so fulfilling is the way Grosz moves from case study to essay, from narrative to hypothesis, including the reader in each mental step. To this end his restraint cedes to an intuitive exuberance. On the subject of parental envy, he remarks on the way a psychoanalyst can envy his patient: at times a patient resolves an issue the psychoanalyst has faced unsuccessfully in his own life. "Any 'parent' can get snagged by this particular form of envy," Grosz writes. And then, in a characteristic leap from the distinct to the universal: "The question is this: can we unhook ourselves by reaching an acceptance of ourselves and our place in time so that we can enjoy our child's pleasures and successes?"
