The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Stephen Grosz
Description
Echoing Socrates' time-honored statement that the unexamined life is not worth living, psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz draws short, vivid stories from his 25-five-year practice in order to track the collaborative journey of therapist and patient as they uncover the hidden feelings behind ordinary behavior.
Key words: Meaning, Purpose
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My Notes
Preface
At one time or another, most of us have felt trapped by things we find ourselves thinking or doing, caught by our own impulses or foolish choices; ensnared in some unhappiness or fear; imprisoned by our own history. We feel unable to go forward and yet we believe that there must be a way. ‘I want to change, but not if it means changing’, a patient once said to me in complete innocence.
How praise can cause a loss of confidence
… Studies on self-esteem have come to the conclusion that praising a child as ‘clever’ may not help her at school. In fact, it might cause her to underperform. Often a child will react to praise by quitting – why make a new drawing if you have already made ‘the best’? Or a child may simply repeat the same work – why draw something new, or in a new way, if the old way always gets applause?
In a now famous 1998 study of children aged ten and eleven, psychologist Carol Dweck and Claudia Mueller asked 128 children to solve a series of mathematical problems. After completing the first set of simple exercise, the researchers gave each child just one sentence of praise. Some were praised for their intellect – ‘You did really well, you’re so clever’; others for their hard work – ‘You did really well, you must have tried really hard’. Then he researchers had the children try a more challenging set of problems. The results were dramatic. The students who were praised for their effort showed a greater willingness to work out new approaches. They also showed more resilience and tended to attribute their failures to insufficient effort, not a lack of intelligence. The children who had been praised for their cleverness worried more about failure, tended to choose tasks that confirmed what they already knew, and displayed less tenacity when the problems got harder. Ultimately, the trill created by being told ‘You’re so clever’ gave way to an increase in anxiety and drop in self-esteem, motivation and performance. When asked by researchers to write to children in another school, recounting their experience, some of the ‘clever’ children lied, inflated their scores. In short, all it took to knock these youngsters’ confidence, to make them so unhappy that they lied, was a sentence of praise.
The Gift of Pain
He seemed never to have acquired a skill that we all need: the ability to make another person worry about us.
At one time or another, we all try to silence painful emotions. But when we succeed in feeling nothing we lose the only means we have of knowing what hurts us, and why.
On not being a couple
… but the most important thing is that the patient should leave our first meeting feeling heard. At the end of this meeting, he should feel that what he came to say, needed to say, has been said, listened to and thought about. In almost all consultations there is a moment when things click, when both people feel there has been an understanding. When that happens, and it can occur at almost any point in the meeting, patient and analyst have a sense that the consultation is over, the thing that was needed has been done.
Being loved is the problem, because love is a demand – when you’re loved, someone wants more of you.
How a fear of loss can cause us to lose everything
Research has shown that, when a fire alarm rings, people do not act immediately. They talk to each other, and they try to work out what is going on. They stand around.
After twenty-five years as a psychoanalyst, I can’t say that this surprises me. We resist change. Committing ourselves to a small change, even one that is unmistakably in our best interest, is often more frightening that ignoring a dangerous situation.
We are vehemently faithful to our own view of the world, our story. We want to know what new story we’re stepping into before we exit the old one. We don’t want an exit if we don’t know exactly where it is going to take us, even – or perhaps especially – in an emergency. This is so, I hasten to add, whether we are patients or psychoanalysts.
How negativity prevents our surrender to love
Like everyone else, psychoanalysts do get caught in the lawyer’s role; our job is to try instead to find a useful question.
On losing a wallet
To begin with, we may be undone if we don’t foresee that winning is also losing.
In Daniel’s case, his first instinct, like mine, was to suspect that the loss of his wallet signified some similar drive to undo his own success. And he too worried about how his success would be affected. ‘It made me queasy when my office manager said, ‘we’re going to have a lot of fun and we’re going to make a lot of money”. If felt a bit of a fraud. Am I really better than the nice other architects on the shortlist? I don’t think so, and they won’t think so either’, he told me.
On mourning the future
I tried to explain what I was thinking to Jennifer. ‘It seems to me that you’re so caught up in the future – your father being at your wedding, having a home near Dan’s parents – that you don’t feel upset about how your life is now, in the present.’
Psychoanalysts are fond of pointing out that the past is alive in the present. But the future is alive in the present too. The future is no some place we’re going to, but an idea in our mind now. It is something we’re creating, that in turn creates us. The future is a fantasy that shapes our present.
On being patient
The shoe nonsense was my attempt to fit in with what she wanted. But who knows what other people want? All our thinking about other people’s desires is assumption – assumption, assumption, assumption.
My job is to listen, then check what I’m hearing against my emotional reactions.
What can really be worrying is when a patient needs to think too highly of his analyst and the analyst goes along with it. Analysts have anxieties too – usually about their capacity to handle what the patient brings to them. Almost every analyst has, at one time or another, colluded with a patient to keep that patient’s most disturbed feelings – anger or madness – from entering the room.
On closure
What they have in common is this: they suffer more because they’re stuck on the idea closure.
They suffer more because they both expect to make progress, to move through certain stages of grief. And when they don’t they feel that they are doing something wrong, or more precisely, that there is something wrong with them. They suffer twice – first from grief and then from a tyranny of should: ‘I should have moved on by now’, and so forth. There is little room here for emotional exploration or understanding. This way of being leads to self-loathing, despair, depression.
Closure is just a delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.
