A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is “OK, acceptable”, more is evidence that she has been “having it off”, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy. A high-flying Fulbright scholar becomes a sex worker to avenge the father she hates. An ex-nun discovers that her decades of religious seclusion were driven by an unconscious fear of pregnancy. A troubled young woman, seeking redress for her psychological losses, steals large sums of money that she will never spend.
In Love’s Labour, the London-based, American-born psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz offers an antidote to the pat, sanitised love stories we absorb through romcoms, reality TV shows and other popular culture. Often, he writes, “easy stories obscure the hard ones”, and the hard ones are most true. “I like older guys”, the kleptomaniac tells him, an explanation that conceals: “I want a man to be the mother I never had.” In Grosz’s telling, psychoanalysis resembles a painstaking, collaborative act of excavation, removing layers of self-deception and motivated reasoning to discover the conflicting fears and desires that lie beneath.
Love’s Labour is Grosz’s second book and like his bestselling 2013 debut, The Examined Life, it is a series of case studies that read like Grimms’ fairytales: dark and allegorical. His patients’ identifying details have been removed, but one imagines the pube-counting professor and others will recognise themselves. That these strange life stories are true(ish), makes them all the more powerful and compelling. The title refers to Grosz’s belief that the work of love is to learn to see oneself and others clearly – which is also the work of psychoanalysis and, arguably, of life.
The book is as much about the mysteries of analysis as it about the mysteries of our hearts and sexual desires. In one chapter, Grosz recounts a fierce argument between two psychoanalysts after one, Susan, discovers that the other, Cora, has been having an affair with her husband. Susan says that Cora has never learned what psychoanalysis should be about: having empathy, behaving morally, accepting reality. But Cora believes the goal is learning to act according to one’s true desires and accept the consequences. Both outcomes, Grosz concludes, can be desirable consequences of analysis, but neither should be the aim of the therapist. To have aims for a patient is to infringe on their autonomy. He aims for nothing more than for his patients to better understand themselves.
As one might expect, therapeutic breakthroughs often happen after Grosz and the patient analyse a dream, and his patients frequently trace the origins of their issues with intimacy to early childhood, to a dead or emotionally absent parent. Each case study can feel like a detective story: a tiny, inconsequential detail may, sometimes years later, unlock a new understanding. And what a long time this process can take! Grosz has been working with patients for 40 years, and sometimes a phone call or chance encounter decades after the initial consultation completely changes his understanding of a person’s predicament. In the penultimate chapter – a pure horror story: chilling, moving, unforgettable – he describes a sculptor who has found himself emotionally and physically stuck since his girlfriend’s suicide. After they have been speaking for 10 years, Tobias recounts a dream that finally enables him to reveal horrifying details about the aftermath of her death, details that help them both understand his emptiness, and that will haunt readers long after they have set this book aside.
“To see the light, you have to go down into the dark,” Grosz writes. His patients often learn that pain or darkness cannot be avoided: to love fully one must accept the reality of loss, to live fully one must accept the reality of death. What a privilege it must be to accompany another person so closely as they try to figure out the challenge of living – of change and love, and accepting love and change. And what a privilege it is for the reader to catch a glimpse of this process.
• Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz is published by Vintage (£18.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
