The Examined Life

Author Stephen Grosz
Narrator Peter Marinker
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 24 August 2023
Run Time 5 hours and 21 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology, Society and Social Sciences.

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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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