Stephen Grosz

Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst—he has worked with patients for more than twenty-five years. Born in America and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, he teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He lives in London. His stories have appeared in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and Granta. A Sunday Times bestseller, The Examined Life, is his first book.

In 2013, Stephen Grosz published his first book, The Examined Life, a collection of psychoanalytic insights gathered over twenty-five years of clinical work. The book was met with acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani said, 'The Examined Life … shares the best literary qualities of Freud’s most persuasive work. 

It is … an insightful and beautifully written book … a series of slim, piercing chapters that read like a combination of Chekhov and Oliver Sacks.' Alexander Linklater, in the Observer, wrote that Grosz's case histories 'are shaped like short stories, but true and moving in ways that fiction cannot be. […] Gradually accumulating through his book, Grosz provides, not a definition, but an enactment of the purpose of psychoanalysis, which is both modest and profound.' An international bestseller, The Examined Life has been translated into over thirty languages, read on the radio, and adapted for the stage.

Grosz conceptualizes psychoanalysis as a process in which a patient tells and re-tells a story about his or her life and works with a psychoanalyst to change that story where it has become a trap – ‘When we cannot find a way to tell our story, our story tells us.’ His alertness to the central place of narrative in psychoanalysis links him to its origins in the work of Sigmund Freud. 

Indeed, Grosz was initially gripped by Freud’s model of the mind and his storytelling. In deploying a narrative, rather than a theoretical argument, to communicate the understanding he has gathered in his clinical work, he aims to offer both fellow clinicians a way of thinking about similar situations with their patients and lay-readers a sense of the delicate, difficult, creative work of psychoanalysis.