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The Examined Life

The Examined Life

How We Lose and Find Ourselves

Summary

**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

Reviews

  • I was enthralled… profound and moving, packed large ideas into a slim volume
    Lucy Lethbridge, Observer Books of the Year

About the author

Stephen Grosz

Stephen Grosz was born in Indiana and educated at Berkeley and Oxford. For the past twenty-five years he has worked as a psychoanalyst. He teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalytic Unit at University College London. His stories have appeared in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and Granta. He lives in London.
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