The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Stephen Grosz, 2013
Why does a person lie for years with no gain at all? Why can praise take a child’s confidence away, and why is resentment easier to bear than loneliness? The psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz tells the stories of his patients, and in each one a strange action turns out to be an attempt to say something. This book teaches you to hear such meaning in others and in yourself.
Who it is for
For anyone who catches themselves doing things they cannot explain, and who wants to understand what lies behind lies, hurt, fear of closeness and fear of change, in themselves and in the people they love.
It turns out that the feeling of being betrayed causes far less pain than the feeling of being forgotten.
Knocking on the wall
Picture two neighboring prison cells. The prisoners want to talk, but a thick wall stands between them. Over time they find a way: they knock on the wall and learn to understand each other’s knocks. The wall that divides them becomes the very thing they speak through. Stephen Grosz opens his book with this parable by the philosopher Simone Weil, and it explains everything that follows.
Stephen Grosz, an American psychoanalyst, has worked in London for more than twenty-five years. In that time he has spent more than fifty thousand hours in conversation with patients. This book grew out of those hours: short stories about people who came to him with one trouble and found a quite different one beneath it. His method is called psychoanalysis. A person speaks many times a week about whatever comes to mind, while the analyst listens and looks for what the person does not know about themselves.
Grosz’s central idea is simple and uncomfortable. Each of us knocks on our own wall: with lies, resentment, flight from those close to us, fear of change, and actions we cannot explain to ourselves. These actions seem senseless, but they have a meaning, and that meaning can be heard. Grosz writes that his book is about the wish to speak, to understand and to be understood, and also about how to listen not only to words but to the pauses between them.
Six stories lie ahead. About praise that undermines confidence. About a man who lied to everyone. About resentment that saves us from loneliness. About love that frightens. About a fire alarm that no one hears. And about why the grandest facade has a back side. None of them is about strangers: in each there is a little of you.
Praise that takes away confidence
Once Grosz was collecting his little daughter from nursery school and heard her teacher praise her drawing: it is the most beautiful tree. A few days later came a new burst of delight: you are a real artist. Both times, Grosz admits, his heart sank. He wanted to ask them to stop praising his daughter.
This sounds strange, because we are used to thinking that praise builds confidence. Grosz draws on research by the psychologists Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller. They gave 128 children problems to solve. After the first task, some were told: you are very clever. Others were told: you must have worked very hard. Then the problems grew harder. The children praised for effort held on longer and tried new routes. The children called clever began to fear mistakes and chose what they could already do. A single sentence of praise made them more cautious.
In Grosz’s view, empty praise is like thoughtless criticism: both show indifference to what the child actually thinks and feels. Praise often lifts the mood of the adult, not the child. And there is another trap: why draw a new picture if the best one has already been drawn?
So what should replace praise? Grosz remembers his neighbor in Indiana, the teacher Charlotte Stiglitz, mother of the Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz. He saw her sitting with a four-year-old boy who was drawing. She did not say “well done.” She noticed how much blue there was in the picture. The boy explained that it was the pond near his grandmother’s house, with a little bridge over it, and wanted to show how he had drawn it. Charlotte did not hurry anywhere. She looked and listened. In Grosz’s words, she was truly there.
It is the difference between applause and a person who comes over and asks what your song is about. Applause fades quickly, but the question stays with you.
Next time, instead of “great,” try saying what exactly caught your eye, and ask how it was done. This works not only with children, but with friends, colleagues and yourself. Grosz honestly writes that being truly attentive is very hard. Yet it is exactly this attention that we often want more than praise.
About the author
Stephen Grosz is an American psychoanalyst, born in 1952 in Indiana, who studied at Berkeley and Oxford. For more than twenty-five years he has worked with patients in London.
All books by this author: Stephen Grosz
Terms from the book
- Michael
- Psychoanalyst
- Philip
- psychoanalysis
- Mueller
- splitting
- Weil: Simone Weil, a French philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century. Grosz opens the book with her parable of two prisoners who talk by knocking on the wall between their cells.
- Dweck: Carol Dweck, an American psychologist at Stanford University, known for research on how praise and beliefs about ability affect persistence.
- Stiglitz: Charlotte Stiglitz, a teacher from Indiana who helped struggling children learn to read, and Grosz’s neighbor. Her son, Joseph Stiglitz, received the Nobel Prize in economics.
- paranoia: A persistent belief that one is being followed, deceived or wished harm, when there are no real grounds for it.
- Panigrosso: Marisa Panigrosso, an employee of a company in the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York, who on 11 September 2001 left the building right after the first plane hit the North Tower. Grosz tells her story from her interview.
- Abby: A fellow passenger on a plane whom Grosz sat beside, who told him the story of her family. Not a patient.
- Prada: An Italian fashion house known for expensive clothes and bags.
All terms
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