The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

by Stephen Grosz

When we envy our children we deceive ourselves – we think too little of them and too well of ourselves.

Sometimes our patients are younger, brighter and financially more successful than we are.

Many psychoanalysts think that lovesickness is a form of regression, that in longing for intense closeness, we are like infants craving our mother’s embrace. This is why we are most at risk when we are struggling with loss or despair, or when we are lonely and isolated – it is not uncommon to fall in love during the first term of university, for example.

‘People who are lovesick put off testing their fantasies against reality.’ But given the anguish that lovesickness can cause – the loss of mental freedom, the dissatisfaction with one’s self, and the awful ache – why do some of us put off facing reality for so long? Often it’s because facing reality means accepting loneliness.

Scrooge doesn’t change because he’s frightened – he changes because he’s haunted. We can be frightened of gaining weight, but that alone probably won’t cause us to change our diet. Haunting is different. It makes us feel – makes us alive to – some fact about the world, some piece of information, that we’re trying to avoid. What knowledge is Scrooge trying to avoid? Scrooge doesn’t want to think about the death of his mother, the death of his sister, or the loss of his fiancée – he cannot bear the thought that love ends.

Ultimately, Scrooge changes because the ghosts unpick his delusion that you can live a life without loss. They undo his delusion by haunting Scrooge with the losses he has already experienced, the losses now being endured around him, and the inevitable loss of his own life and possessions.

Sometimes change comes not because we set out to fix ourselves, or repair our relation to the living; sometimes we change most when we repair our relation to the lost, the forgotten, the dead. As Scrooge grieves for those he had loved but put out of his mind, he begins to regain the world he had lost. He comes to life.

representing Helen’s denial of time passing, her desire to eternalise the present.

We resist change. Committing ourselves to a small change, even one that is unmistakably in our best interest, is often more frightening than ignoring a dangerous situation.

We hesitate, in the face of change, because change is loss. But if we don’t accept some loss – for Tamitha, the loss of her baby photos – we can lose everything.

Her anxiety – which is her motivation for change – has found its way into her mother.

Like everyone else, psychoanalysts do get caught in the lawyer’s role; our job is to try instead to find a useful question. Our weapon against negativity is not persuasion, it’s understanding.

Sarah’s negativity was a reaction to her positive, affectionate feelings for Alex – it was a reaction to the prospect of love.

Better to be in the position of having lost something than to be something someone forgot.

There are various ways to circumvent depressed, anxious feelings. It’s not uncommon, for example, to exploit sexual fantasies, or to use hypochondriacal worries. Elizabeth employed her disasters to calm herself – they were her tranquilliser.

It’s also not uncommon to use some large-scale calamity, or someone else’s personal disaster – the newspapers are full of both – to distract oneself from one’s own destructive impulses, and I soon noticed this tendency in Elizabeth.

In 1956, the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in an essay on unconscious guilt, pointed out in passing that a melancholic patient may irrationally confess to starting some major disaster, one to which he has no connection whatsoever. ‘The illness’, he writes, ‘is an attempt to do the impossible. The patient absurdly claims responsibility for general disaster, but in so doing avoids reaching his or her personal destructiveness.’ In other words, sometimes we might try to assume responsibility for a major disaster in order to avoid responsibility for our own destructive behaviour.

Like Elizabeth, we can take on a catastrophe to stop ourselves feeling and thinking – and to avoid responsibility for our own intimate acts of destruction.

Graham’s long detours into the past were a haven from the present. Over and over, without knowing it, he was refusing to let the present matter.

You can be a mother, because you’ve discovered you don’t have to be a mother like your mum.”

We worked out that he was frightened that my words might harm him, make him ill, like the foetus who was being infected by the mother. He said, ‘I get scared that if we talk about it, or even if we think about it, I’ll get ill.’

Anthony has told me that he felt these silences were healing too, a chance for him to regress, to be looked after. The deepening quiet was a sign of Anthony’s deepening trust. It may be that his silences were also a way of rehearsing the moment of his death, but most of all, they were something we went through together. And in doing so, Anthony found that he could more easily bear the idea of his death, accept the silence, because he felt himself alive in the mind of another.

I’ve long thought that Kübler-Ross was wrong. The ‘psychological stages’ of dying and grieving are wholly different. For the person who dies there is an end, but this is not so for the person who grieves.

My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow.

Closure is just as delusive – it is the false hope that we can deaden our living grief.