Interviews

A Psychoanalyst Lets Us Eavesdrop

Stephen Grosz’s books show a new generation the inner workings of psychoanalysis.

By Daphne Merkin

March 3, 2026

To many of us, what goes on in analysis or psychotherapy remains a well-guarded mystery, and its practitioners mythical creatures, bearers of special wisdom — or, if we are skeptical enough about the profession’s effectiveness, like Wizards of Oz behind the curtain. In his new book, “Love’s Labor,” Stephen Grosz, an American-born psychoanalyst who has practiced in London since 1987, breaks the spell by taking us directly into the sanctum sanctorum, otherwise known as the analyst’s office.

One of the most gripping, curvy stories in the book, which comprises 12 case studies about love and intimacy (all of which, to a greater or lesser degree, are fictionalized), is called “Connections.” It involves two married couples, three members of whom are psychoanalysts from New York and close friends. Grosz, then in his early 40s and unmarried, first meets them at a conference of American and European analysts in Cork, Ireland, and continues to see them over the next six years at other meetings. Both couples are “appealing people” who seem content in their lives, until it suddenly emerges at a meeting in Glasgow that one of the women, Cora, is sleeping with the husband of the other woman, Susan.

This development leads to an all-out confrontation between the two women at a cafe. Susan calls Cora a “sociopath” and accuses her of not understanding what being a psychoanalyst is about: “Mending. Repairing. Having empathy. Caring for others. Respecting boundaries.” Cora hits back: “You don’t sound like a psychoanalyst. You sound like some old rabbi.” And she insists that the true aim of psychoanalysis is allowing a person to acknowledge their real desires, however difficult or inconvenient, so that they can live more freely and truthfully. As Cora pleads with her to understand things from her perspective, Susan slaps down some money and walks away.

Both women confide in Grosz the details of the fight, and a year later his friends’ furious disagreement about the purpose of psychoanalysis still disturbs him, so much so that he is prompted to try to refine his own definition of it. He makes a list of different ideas that have struck him from his reading and training, among them: to make what is unconscious conscious (Freud); to break the spell of self-deception (Amadeo Limentani); to tolerate ambivalent feelings and experience the world with less fear and fragmentation (Melanie Klein); to wrest knowledge from suffering (Jonathan Lear).

None of these are fully satisfying: Grosz finds himself questioning the very notion of an “aim” in psychoanalysis. It seems to him that insisting upon one is “an intrusion on the patient’s autonomy — an attack on the power to identify one’s own desires, decide one’s own mind.” In the end, the friendship between Grosz and the two couples fizzles out, but what lingers is his respect for both Susan’s and Cora’s points of view and curiosity about how psychoanalysis might help them bear their rage, disappointment and colliding needs.

This vignette, and the circling approach to its subject, coming in close and lifting off for a more aerial view, is typical of Grosz. His capacity for self-interrogation, and for constantly turning over in his mind what the role of an analyst should be, characterizes all of the case studies in “Love’s Labor.” Grosz, who is 73, first became well known to readers in 2013 when he published “The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves.” Based on 25 years of his work with patients, the book, a collection of 31 case studies, became a critically acclaimed best seller in England and went on to sell nearly half a million copies worldwide, as well as being translated into more than 30 languages.

(read the full interview in the New York Times)

I Met The Man Who Knows Why People Cheat, Get Divorced Or Find Lasting Love

It’s November 1989 and Sophie is engaged to be married. Nick, her fiancé, has sent his half of the wedding invitations. Her half of the invitations, all 60 of them, remain in a carrier bag under her desk at work. She can’t bring herself to post them, and she’s not sure why. It’s not that she doesn’t love him – she does, she can’t wait to get married – but still, the invitations stay at the office. Eventually, a friend puts her in touch with the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, in the hope that he might be able to tell her why.

During a long and curious consultation, Sophie unpacks her childhood, and the ways in which loss – which is in some ways another word for “change” – had threatened her family unit. It wasn’t that she was afraid of marriage, per se, but perhaps she was afraid of the losses that marriage might entail. Because loss, as Grosz points out to me over Zoom some 35 years later, is fundamental to life, and also love. “Development, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is losing something that you don’t want to lose [in order] to have the new thing.” When it comes to that sort of exchange, some are more reluctant than others. Sophie posted her invitations the weekend after that initial consultation.

Grosz’s new book, Love’s Labour, recounts this and many other sessions from the past few decades of his work as a psychoanalyst. We’re introduced to people who’ve had affairs, who’ve found themselves embroiled in on-off, off-on relationships, who’ve destroyed their relationships with paranoia, who keep dating different versions of the same person. If Grosz’s first book, The Examined Life, was all about his patients’ personal lives and struggles, Love’s Labour – which is written in a similar way, as a series of case studies – is much more interested in his patients’ approach to love specifically: why might we behave in the ways we do, and what might that say about all of us?

As someone who is incredibly obsessed with other people’s personal lives and the minutiae of their relationships, even if I don’t know them, I couldn’t wait to pick Grosz’s brain. Here’s everything we spoke about.

Why did you decide to write this book?

This book came to me because I realised that, with my patients, we were arriving at things which were very different from how people ordinarily think about love… People come and tell me stories. That’s how psychoanalysis works too, because, when my students read case histories, it’s the story-ness of it that really gets you, so it has to be written as a story too. I started thinking that I want to write in this area, in love, and really about the work of it.
You’ve mentioned that, over the course of a marriage, you’ll go through phases of hating each other. Why do you think some people choose to get divorced, while others see it through?

Quite interestingly, I have men come into my room – more often men – who have been remarrying different women, but what they should have done is remarry the woman they started with.

In many instances [divorce] is probably a good idea – I can’t judge. But sometimes, there’s the possibility of people really changing and breaking through the false narrative they’ve generated around themselves about the other person. And if you can do that, you can then remarry [that same person]. This isn’t how most books talk about marriage, so I wanted to. That’s what I was seeing my patients do. They were teaching me, in fact, about all of this.

(read the full interview)

This man could save your marriage

After 40 years as a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz knows a thing or two about what makes a successful relationship. The Examined Life author talks commitment, parenting and love in the age of internet dating

(Charlotte Ivers, The Times)

Stephen Grosz did not expect to be having this conversation. When he published The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves in 2014 he thought it would just end up in specialist psychology bookshops. He calls it “this old thing on the shelf”. Instead the book became a Sunday Times No 1 bestseller and was translated into 30 languages. “I was really surprised,” he says.

He shouldn’t have been. Grosz’s book, a collection of stories relayed and lessons learnt after 25 years speaking to patients, scratched that most fundamental of human itches: the desire to know what is going on in other people’s heads. Since The Examined Life, psychology books have been a mainstay of the bestseller charts, spreading to television and podcasts with shows such as the BBC series Couples Therapy and the podcast Where Should We Begin? with the psychotherapist Esther Perel.

Now aged 72 and more than a decade since his debut, Grosz has written Love’s Labour, sating perhaps an even more fundamental human urge: our desire to know what is going on in other people’s bedrooms.

Love’s Labour follows a similar format to The Examined Life: a series of vignettes from his meetings with patients. A woman who loves her fiancé deeply can’t bring herself to send her half of the invitations for their wedding. A troubled young man is unable to forgive himself for the suicide of his girlfriend. A man leaves his wife for another woman and when that other woman dies he holds his ex-wife’s hand at the funeral for comfort. From these stories Grosz hopes to share “hard-won truths that my patients and I won together”.

We meet in Grosz’s treatment room on the ground floor of the beautiful terraced house in Hampstead, north London, that he shares with his wife, Nicola, an academic and translator, and his two children, a daughter, aged 22, and a 19-year-old son. “They will abide by no psychoanalysis upstairs. In fact, if one of my children has a dream they will usually turn to my wife,” he says with a laugh.

The place is a picture-perfect representation of what you imagine a psychoanalyst’s office to be: walls lined with books, a big bay window, a couch. Grosz is similarly perfectly cast: tall, with neat white hair and a calm voice, the slightest of American lilts still present from his upbringing in Indiana and university years at Berkeley, California.

“I have to sit there,” he gestures to his analyst’s chair, “otherwise this will feel odd.” If I were his analyst perhaps I’d recognise an anxiety in him — the man who asks questions now has to face questions. That’s part of the appeal of Grosz’s books: he makes you feel as if you can do this too. “This” is psychoanalysis, a therapeutic technique pioneered by Sigmund Freud that seeks to draw out the patient’s unconscious thoughts and get to the source of their distress.

A key part of this is the interpretation of dreams — something that comes up frequently in Grosz’s books. “I’m aware that most of the people who read this book will not have had analysis, so part of it was trying to convey what the experience is like,” he says.

Take the woman in Love’s Labour who visits Grosz because she is unable to send out wedding invitations. She arrives with a dream that she is uncomfortable relaying. While she is not Jewish (Grosz is), she dreamt the night before that she was herded into a changing room, promised a shower and instead found herself in a gas chamber.

The two mull over what this dream might mean. They eventually come to realise it “is not about Nazis or Jews”, Grosz says. Instead the changing room represents his office: a room where people change. The dream is a manifestation of “her anxiety about her terrible loss of her birth family if she marries her husband. She doesn’t want to give up what she has. She wants the new thing — to marry this guy — but she doesn’t want to lose her parents and she sees sending out the invitations as annihilating the family.”

“The dream is a kind of doorway in. I often see them like a movie that the patient has written, directed, produced and starred in. It’s a pure internal creation of ourselves. Today people are so focused externally that they are not thinking about their dreams, they are not thinking about their daydreams — fantasies just pass through their mind for the most part. In therapy dreams are a good way of showing a person to be more alert to their internal world and their feelings.”

Read the full article at The Times