The Examined Life

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

**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

©2013 Stephen Grosz (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • I was enthralled… profound and moving, packed large ideas into a slim volume

    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

    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

    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

    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

    Evening Standard

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