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Stephen Grosz, "Love's Labour: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love" (Vintage, 2026)
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Stephen Grosz
It is an honor to share.
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Commercial Narrator
No, it's our honor.
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Stephen Grosz
It is our larger honor.
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Helena Wiesing
No, really, stop.
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Stephen Grosz
Ba da ba ba ba and participate in McDonald's while supplies last spring just
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slid into your DMs.
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Helena Wiesing
Grab that boho.
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Helena Wiesing
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Stephen Grosz
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Helena Wiesing
Hello, this is Helena Wiesing, your host on the New Books Network. Today I'm talking to Stephen Grobbs about his book Love's How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love. Welcome to the show, Stephen.
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Stephen Grosz
Thank you, Hana. Thank you.
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Helena Wiesing
It's really a pleasure for me to get to talk with you. I had a really good time listening reading your book. I want to open with our traditional opening question. So I love this psychoanalytic question to the extent that one can know one's motivations. What motivated you to write this book?
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Stephen Grosz
Both of my books, my first book, the Examined Life, and this book, come from my personal experience as an analyst, but also my stage in life. I started writing at the age of 50 and the Examined Life was published when I was 60 and I'm now 73. I took another 10 plus years to write Love's Labor. I had children for the first time at 50 and I think family and wanting them to have a sense of who I am and what I do. But I was very focused on trying to give a real sense of the lived experience of psychoanalysis, what happens in the consulting room so that I come from a family where my mother died at a relatively young age. My father had heart attacks in his 50s. So I had a very clear sense of wanting my children, my family, to know who I was and what I did. But I also wanted to tackle the questions that most engaged me in a way that I felt might engage others to write about them. The first book is about a wide range of problems. They're problems that I obviously don't have. There are problems in there about. From my work as a child analyst, for example. The second book, or the book we're talking about now, Loves labor is about something we've all experienced, including psychoanalysts, we've all fallen in love. And so it's a more personal book because in a sense I thought it would be cowardly or sort of timid not to include aspects of my own experience in the new book. So it's somewhat different, but again, it's trying to write about a lived, ordinary experience, but from a psychoanalytic perspective and using experiences from the consulting room.
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Helena Wiesing
Yes. And this part about what you share, I mean, this is what struck me the most reading is that I would, I would describe it as a. You, you write very generously. You, you share things and you kind of put yourself into the, the material, the topic, along with clients and also colleagues, by the way. So I, what I noted was I, I was sensing this like elements of compassion, also what I would call tenderness. And maybe even this might sound a little, a bit solemn, but like reverence, like my sense was like you're writing with a sense of reverence for what you're writing about, which is a lot of things, but it's about life and love, loves the work of love. I would say the book is also about, you know, when people are at an impasse in their lives. I was really deeply struck by one, many quotes and one in the, in the introduction you write, pain is the finest instrument for knowing what we desire. And what I was really struck by is that this is an. In psychoanalytic insight, but it's presented in like a very compassionate, non judgmental way where it's not about, you know, judging the human tendency to self sabotage, but to actually really reckon with it. And I wonder if you could speak to that, if that was also something that came up in the writing process.
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Stephen Grosz
I'm touched by, you know, your use of the word reverence. But I do feel that towards. And this podcast is lovely because it's for colleagues, which I always am very moved by. I find it very, very important, those meetings that I have with analysts and psychotherapists, counselors, people who are working with other people. You'll have noticed in the book there's a number of moments where I talk about my supervision when I was younger, the work that I did with colleagues. And I do feel a very, there's an active memory of How I became an analyst, the things that affected me, the things that moved me. But you're right, in the prologue I do talk about pain. I talk about it by talking about my own analysis. And it's in the context of beginning a psychoanalysis and remembering, as I said, I'm 73 now, remembering when I was 31 and beginning my five time a week psychoanalysis, my training, analysis and remembering who I was then. There's a wonderful thing, I'm trying to remember where it is, where Virginia Woolf says that she doesn't like biographies because they're usually this happened and then this happened and then this happened and, and what the person doesn't put in is who was the person who those things were happening to, the events of this. And I tried in that beginning just a little bit to get some of who I was at 31 back onto the page. And of course, when I was 31, I thought of pain as a problem. All the ordinary feelings we feel when we love someone, longing, that terrible ache of longing when we fall in love or the anxiety, will they love me, will they not love me? What are they feeling, what are they thinking? Or grief when it ends? All those feelings I thought of as. And my 31 year old self thought of those as feelings to avoid, not a value. They were almost like symptoms to be removed. And as you said, I didn't understand then, but I think through my analysis you begin to understand that pain is the best instrument, the finest instrument we have for knowing what our heart wants for our desires. And I now listen to that, of course, in my patients. I don't know if you've had this experience, but I had someone who was telling me how much she loved this man and how. And all of her. But of course he went away for a couple months at one point to work from London. He went to New York. And I didn't remember her once saying that she'd missed him. And the absence of that pain of missing really struck me, you know, which I could then point out to her. And that led to a really interesting conversation about part of what she wanted in that relationship was the distance. And that led to more insight about her and how she loved. So, yeah, I mean, to me there were a number of things which I said in the beginning about things which I didn't understand. But I think analysis really uses that people outside of the analytic world sometimes don't realize how we're thinking or why we're thinking the way we are.
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Helena Wiesing
Yes, and that you start with this in the beginning of the book, like you said, you describe remembering your very first analytic session. And I thought that was very exciting and gripping. It engaged me. And that's also what I. When I think about the generous writing, I feel like that's generous to share that. And you also describe it very kind of in a sensory way, so we can really imagine the situation. And later in the book, we see how you kind of show us the importance of this, because there's one of the many stories of clients and patients or people you work with. Um, at one point you're trying to really understand a client and, and their kind of paradoxical behavior, and you're reminded of your younger self.
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Stephen Grosz
Yeah.
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Helena Wiesing
And the. The way. Because I. I feel like this is such a. A way to really demonstrate what is this. I. I feel like empathy or sympathy. Those words don't really cover what it is, this practice of having really engaged in your own lifelong process and making use of that for the work.
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Stephen Grosz
It's a really, really good point, and I think it's one of the things, you know, our own personal psychoanalysis is terribly important, but one of the things we then have to learn through our clinical experience is just to use some of that knowledge which we've gained and when we see it in others, but also how wildly different other people are from us too, we cannot just generalize from our own experience. We have to be continually learning about the diversity of our patients, the diversity of their experience, and both using our training analysis, but also setting it aside and being able to see someone's tremendous difference from us. So this was a patient who was, I think, in many ways like me, but also in many ways not like me too. So there were elements where I could use things which I had learned, but also then learn more about something which I hadn't understood. It also shows here I can say to you, at the age of 73, that patient was teaching me things. Now, about the issue we had in common was surrender and submission. And something I had always mistaken. I'd mistaken a submission or being submissive to the beloved as a kind of emotional surrender. In fact, it's a masquerade of genuine surrender, emotional surrender. But I began to see with that patient later on how it was also defense against the reality of time. When you're not surrendered to another, you're not in time in a way too. So continuing to learn things about something which I'd originally seen in my analysis
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Helena Wiesing
many years before, and you're going right into these topics that I had also have questions and wonderings about. Because this thing about the both the sameness and otherness or the difference, it's. So you really clearly connect that to what we could, you know, the title and the main topic, you know, love's Labor. What is love's labor? And I would love to talk more about this connection here. There's some really very clear quotes, like you also quote Iris Murdoch saying. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love is the discovery of reality. And that's like a really nice kind of quote to kind of orient it. And then you, you kind of explain like the, the title here. You say, well, what is love's labor? Love's labor is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and, and our loved ones. And it is our attempt to join the world as it is. And I really appreciated how in a way you, you make, you, you express that very clearly. It's almost like simple, yet it's not simple in life. And I, I wonder how if you could speak some more to this. I know it also connects to this, the difference between surrendering and submission. But like that topic there, Loves, labor. How you came to know that this was gonna be the title and the focus.
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Stephen Grosz
To me it's what links together our work, psychoanalysis, seeing patients and thinking about them and love. And also the kind of aim of life that to me, if life does have a name, it's just. It is to see clearly ourselves and others and to understand ourselves as best we can and the people we love as best we can the world. And when I say it's our attempt to join the world as it is, I mean by that, you know, without idealization or fantasy completely clouding our view or fear on the other side. The point of the. What I say also somewhere in the preface or prologue is that we are by nature, I mean, the analytic view of us or ourselves, I think, is that we are fundamentally self deceiving. We tell ourselves stories all the time. We're always talking to ourselves in our head about all sorts of things going on around us. But we also are capable of undoing self deception. And that's the work of analysis. And I also think that's the work of love. At one point I quote Krazwa Miwosz, the Polish poet who wrote a wonderful poem called Love, I think, and he says, love means to learn to look at yourself the way one looks at distant things, for you are only one thing among many. And whoever sees that way heals his heart. And I liked that idea of Love is about getting a perspective on ourselves and our place in the world. And so that's sort of the stories in the book are about those people that are able to do that. That means freeing ourselves from quite often, you know, popular narrative and stories that are both limited and limiting popular culture or the way we look at Instagram or social media or celebrity news or news in general or films and sometimes just not see things as clearly as we might. Love's labor is the work of so the book has some stories where people can do that and are quite imaginative. And then there are some stories which are rather tragic, where people get stuck and can't do that, and we all know that they get trapped in a kind of sense of superiority or arrogance and won't give up their narrative. We all know that from our work with patients who are both wanting to change but are refusing to let go of particular narratives Protein is now at Starbucks and it's never tasted so good. You can add protein cold foam to your favorite drink or try one of our new protein lattes or Matcha. Try it today at Starbucks.
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Stephen Grosz
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Helena Wiesing
Yeah, I think in your, in your, the first book you have, you quoted that there was one time a client who had said to you, I want to change, but just not if it requires me to change.
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Stephen Grosz
Yeah, yeah, I want to change it, not if it means changing. And the funny thing about that, and again, you'll appreciate that is I didn't say, you know, which I just said in my prepis. A patient once said to me, and after the book came out, I think half my patients said, that was me, wasn't it? I'm sure I'll send that to you at some point. And everyone thinks they have said that to their analysts. Even I had a thought for a moment. Did I say something? I must have said something because I think it's so universally true. We do want to, but it is. Yeah.
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Helena Wiesing
And to your point, about like the, the cultural narratives and social media, I think, I mean, I thought, reading this book, I was really thinking about, you know, you, in a way, these analytic insights are so, we, they're the foundation of psychoanalysis. Right. The ambivalence, the, the struggle, you know, of love's labor and the fact that, for example, you know, where we, where we love, we hate. Where we hate, we love. Right. You, you have a beautiful exploration of that through the stories. And I'm really struck by, I see again and again in our hyper digitalized cultural discourses, there's such a kind of a disavowal or splitting off or denial of that. Like people talk about, as if they have perfect control. They talk about, you know, it should be straightforward. You know, you figure out what kind of partner do I want and go get it. And if you're not making it work, something's wrong. And I, I was really struck by how, how you, you have seen that throughout your career. Is that, is this a, an ongoing thing? Has there been openings? But I feel like it maybe it's almost. We're in a time where it's gotten worse. This, this fantasy of control of our emotional love lives.
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Stephen Grosz
That's interesting. I, I, I don't know. I mean, that's one of the problems about being an analyst is you know, your patients and, you know, your world that you're in. I don't, I do have a lot of young people, 25 to 40, and there sends to me, a kind of, because of dating apps, because of dating, because of all sorts of things. There's a kind of, well, grass is always greener. There's always, I can keep looking, I can. And a kind of, I think, not knowing what their internal criteria is of what they're looking for, a kind of internal confusion of what they think they should be looking for. But I even myself in the beginning, in the prologue, I say I thought love was a position best filled by a committee. Like I thought I should take it to my friends and they would help me. I didn't understand quite often with patients now of mine, I will question when they very quickly want to take someone they're dating to meet friends or their parents or something like that. Young people. And I try to slow down and say, maybe we should just figure out what your feelings before you start looking and thinking about what other people feel about X or Y. And that is really anxiety provoking for some people to go on that journey of discovering what they want and why they want it. But I think analysis is invaluable for that. It's so special because it is that unique two people thinking together about someone's feelings and desires.
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Helena Wiesing
Yeah. And there's so many of the stories that also illustrate what you're talking about here, about just how intense the work we have to do to reach each other is just how much work it is. And I think maybe there's. Maybe this is in our time where things are very optimized and very fast and very efficient and very instant gratification. There's maybe this illusion that, well, if you can just get an answer quickly, you can kind of skip ahead and, and, and get to that fully formed, stable relationship that we all long for. And you're really showing how, how. Because you also have several stories where they actually span over many, many years because of people you've seen. And then it took. Maybe they left and then they came back after many years. So there's this very fascinating element of the temporality that you bring in. And I wonder what that was like to write in that way. Looking back years before and thinking ahead too.
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Stephen Grosz
I'm remembering, it's a very good question. I'm remembering one of my editors said, couldn't you just cut this down and say five years instead of 10 years or even less?
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Helena Wiesing
And.
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Stephen Grosz
But it wasn't. It was 10 years of an analysis where someone kept something incredibly vital from me and only talked about it after 10 years. You can't fudge that. And I think, yeah, those Stories. There are a couple of them where. Which is also, I think, too, where you would look at it again, your work. Some years later, there's a case where I thought it'd gone well. And then years later, I realized it hadn't. When the wife came and rang and said she wanted her husband to come back into analysis, that she had cancer. She was unwell. His behavior was just as it was when he began his analysis. What had happened? Why wasn't he. And sometimes we do have insights later on that we didn't see things we didn't understand at the time or things that became clear only at the end of an analysis. In his case, it was a really interesting case about someone who envied his wife's capacity for love. And so he was making up narratives about her being unfaithful and all these things. But really, I didn't understand it at the time as a kind of value vandalizing the real, genuine love she was giving. He was almost. I would say, almost delusional, his convictions about her. And I thought they were just a defense against allowing himself to become deeply dependent on her. But in fact, it became clear later on the more she loved him. It was one of those moments where she was very loving and supportive, that he was his most destructive. And in a way, it helped me to see that there can be a kind of envy of someone else's capacity for love. It's a lovely paper by Ines Sodre on Othello, which is looking at it not from the theme of jealousy, but from Iago's envy of Othello and Desdemona's love. That what he's destroying is that they both are capable of deep love and he is not. It's an envious attack, not jealous of her love or his love for her. And it's a kind of. That was a very inspirational insight that helped me with my analytic work with that patient. So, yeah, sometimes things are only knowable later on. You said something else at the beginning, too, about my bringing myself in in a certain way. That was a good point. I can tell you, just as a writer, that you need to do that. Because one of the things I've learned through writing and thinking about writing and I taught a course on writing the case history at University College and the psychoanalysis unit and thinking about how case histories are written. You only believe a writer, whether it's a novel or nonfiction, if you believe the narrator in the novel. So the narrator has to be there and reveal enough of him or herself that you know they're telling the truth. You have to put yourself on the page enough so that otherwise the reader doesn't believe the case. I think whatever the case is like and we can read whatever it's, you know, Freud, Klein, Winnicott, whoever. You read a case like the Piggle written by Winnicott, it's incredibly compelling in part because Winnicott, you see him with the patient, he gives a very good. And you get enough of him to believe the truth. The being there, what it was like to really be there with that patient.
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Helena Wiesing
There are so many things here you're saying. I feel like I have lots of questions about, I mean of course with the envy, we're invoking Melanie Klein and you also have some notes, references to her. And it's also a good example of how you know that the different schools of psychoanalysis, right. They're not these like clear cut formula or protocols to pick from. Right. But they, they offer different things for different top topics and themes. And it's, it's clear how like declining ideas of envy. I mean this is Klein's understanding of that was really revolutionary. It was so important. And again and again we see how helpful it is to really understand the destructiveness of envy. And also you, we, you also mentioned Winnicott's several times and like you talked about also he also brings himself into it in the writing. Um, but I, I, what I find interesting is also how you writing about being an analyst not just as like someone who applies a certain technique, but also as being part of a lineage. I was very, very excited and, and touched by how you, you write about meeting Anafroid.
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Stephen Grosz
Yeah.
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Helena Wiesing
And because, I mean I, I could just imagine that experience, what the experience was like for you. And you talk about the experience and also the complexity of that experience. It was very nuanced. And then just, just hearing that and I, I really felt the sense of like the lineage of our, our field of hearing the stories of that. And, but then also besides from, from Anna Freud, there's also. What is her name? The first flag Britain history battle singer. Yes, yes. You also have a.
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Stephen Grosz
Who's just wonderful.
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Helena Wiesing
Yeah.
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Stephen Grosz
I wish she was better known. I mean one of the things you're pointing to, which I would say is, you know, you can hear. You know, I was born in Indiana. I went to Berkeley as an undergraduate and grew up in the States and very much feel I'm an American, but I feel I've lived here now over 40 years longer and trained here. I feel very lucky. The British Cyclonetic Society is a wonderful, wonderful place. And when I joined it in the 80s, it was unique in that half the members were women, half were non medical, half were foreign. A lot of the British Cyclinic Society are people like myself who've come from South America or America or Europe and are here and trained and then stayed on. And I feel very lucky in that I was taught by people of all different kinds of schools, of the contemporary Freudians or Freudians, the Independent group and the Klein group, and really benefited from that. It was quite a wonderful place to train and still is a wonderful place to train and work. In part because to me it's. Then I don't feel it's sort of like physics. I don't think I'm a Newtonian or Heisenbergian or I don't think of myself as a Kleinian or an independent or so much as a physicist should think of himself probably as a physicist. I think of myself as a psychoanalyst. And there are all these ideas that I can and do make use of and love reading about work going on in other places in the world and other ways of thinking and working as well.
- [32:04]
Helena Wiesing
And to that point, there's a place in the book where you do something that I really was really struck by this and really found it very, very useful. You compile a list of different takes on the question of what is the aim of a psych psychoanaly analysis. And I really love that because you do it in a way not to kind of do some kind of like evaluation or which one is the correct one, quote, unquote. You, you do it to really show the way that the different takes offer different kind of, I would say even like poetic elements of it. And it's like, I feel like that list is like something. And just looking at that for anyone in training or like you could just look at that, that could stimulate so much reflection. But. And you also say it's you, you say that it's, it's, it's, it's also kind of a, a problem in itself to try to define it.
- [33:12]
Stephen Grosz
Yeah, I mean, that story is very heartfelt. It's a story of two analytic couples or a couple, it's analysts as a analyst married to a writer in the story. And it's about what they both think, the two women, one woman goes off, has an affair with the other analyst's husband. And it's having to think very carefully. You know, they have two very clearly different views about what. Analysis is one thing. Analysis is about learning about reality. About boundaries, about repair, renewal, you take care of the people you love, that you don't go around crashing, about acting impulsively and destroying, but you love is taken care of and curbing your desires sometimes when needed. And the other person thinks that no analysis is there to really go into yourself, to see and look at your desires and all their complexity and conflict and contradiction, decide what you want and if you're prepared to pay the price, get into difficulties, or with your children, with your family, with your ex, whatever, and just. And then to go for what you want in life, if you're prepared to pay the cost for it. And there were two such different views of the aims of analysis that it threw me into thinking about what is the aim of analysis. And so that moment of that lisc came, and it's literally true, just sitting there thinking. And different thoughts came to me from seminars, from reading, from clinical experiences, from conversation. So it's a rather long list of everything from what Freud thought, Naomi Klein, Michael Balin, Norman O. Brown, Jonathan Lear, contemporary analysts here, Marian Milner, Lawson versus and coming eventually to a kind of conclusion that in a way, analysis should do all these different things that these analysts suggest. I quote them. But then realizing that bit of Freud where he talks about, in a way, we shouldn't have any aim for our patient, that that is a kind of therapeutic zeal, which is actually cruel. And we have to, and I quote something which again, I felt analysts will understand. But I quote Bion when, you know, in thinking about that problem, I remembered something he had said to a patient. I don't know why you're so angry with me. I'm not trying to help you.
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Helena Wiesing
Yes, that was amazing. Love that.
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Stephen Grosz
Meaning that for beyond and for me, and I think for a lot of British, the aim of analysis is to understand. I'm not here to help people in that sense. The medicine of psychoanalysis is understanding. I believe it helps ultimately. But the idea is there's a difference between a patient coming in and. And. Or a friend. I can help a friend who's breaking up with his wife or partner, load everything in my car and move him to a new place. But a week later he can be in a worse relationship. That's helping. Understanding is hopefully working with someone so they have insight into why they have gotten into this, so that whatever they do, they learn from their mistake and perhaps don't do that again. They make new mistakes. But, um, that's what I. I liked about the. The beyond quote. But it was trying to thrash all that out in myself about what is the aim of an analysis from from personal experience. You're out of these personal experiences.
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- [38:08]
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Helena Wiesing
I know this is like just a minor detail, but in that list I just, I was so, so delighted to see that one of the people you also quote is. Is Dinora Pines.
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Stephen Grosz
Yes.
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Helena Wiesing
Because I have, I very rarely hear people reference her and she's extraordinary. My, I was my, my dissertation advisor brought my attention to her and, and she's a really overlooked analyst.
- [39:07]
Stephen Grosz
And she's an overlooked analyst. Dinora supervised me and she was amazing. And we, we went to Russia together back in the 90s to teach psychoanalysis a couple of times. She was the most remarkable. She was a doctor, then she became a dermatologist. And it was through her work thinking about the skin and seeing how psychosomatic so many skin problems were that she became interested in psychoanalysis. Trained. And she was a phenomenal psychoanalyst. A wonderful person too. Incredible. Just love of life and a superb clinician. Trained many, many analysts in the British Psychoanalytics Society. But you're absolutely right. It's a shame that she's not more thought about and talked about. But her book, I don't even know if it's still in print. The world's use of the body.
- [40:04]
Helena Wiesing
I have it, yes. Because I used it for my dissert. I guess she didn't. Maybe she didn't write that much.
- [40:12]
Stephen Grosz
Her papers, the ones that she did write, I think are superb.
- [40:15]
Helena Wiesing
Amazing.
- [40:15]
Stephen Grosz
Yes. Yeah. And I also think about her clinically because her focus was very much on, you know, not speaking in cliches and to find. She taught me, you know, she would say, let's stop and think about how you could put that thought to the patient so that they can hear it. She really listened to the patient's listening. How the patient heard what you said and what they were taking in, what they were not taking in. And if they were not taking in something that was important, she would try and help you to restructure the statement. So the way you address their anxiety so that, you know, you're anxious about X. And therefore. Yes, she had a way of really thinking about, with great clarity, very plain language, very ordinary. My writing, to a certain degree, will reflect her view too. She was a wonderful kind of just belief in ordinary speaking, listening. And again, that the work of being an analyst is to get as close to the patient as is humanly possible as an analyst. Which means another person who's not talked about now I mentioned, I think on that list is John Klauber. I'm not sure. I do mention, but John Klauber was president of our society. Died at a young age. But he once said that psychoanalysis is the closest relationship two people can have without touching. And it, meaning it is so. And that's the aim of it, too, is to be that close so that people can bring themselves as fully as possible to the analysis. Yeah.
- [42:06]
Helena Wiesing
Was that Dr. Lemontani?
- [42:10]
Stephen Grosz
Yes, Dr. Lemontani was my analyst. He was also. He was of that same generation as John Klauber.
- [42:18]
Helena Wiesing
I loved the one you put for him in the list to break the spell of self deception.
- [42:24]
Stephen Grosz
Yes.
- [42:25]
Helena Wiesing
I mean, that's that because it speaks to the mystery like it is. A self deception is like a spell, like the way we're gripped by it. And it also kind of alludes a little playfully to the need for some magic that we need to break this. So I really love that one.
- [42:46]
Stephen Grosz
That was very much his view, which was that we could get. And we know this when we're in a couple, when we're arguing with our partner, we're in fact, so often trapped in our own narrative, the spell, the story we're telling, which allows us to be superior, to be, I quote, the Ecstasy of sanctimony. That would be sanctimonious to be eye rolling, to be the pleasure of exasperation, of how could you do this? All those sorts of arrogance. And that moment with patients sometimes when, you know, they start listening both in the analysis and can sort of start listening to their partner anew and think, huh, she's right, actually I'm worse than what she's thinking. I'm actually much worse. She thinks I'm this, I'm terrible, I'm X. I do this where people can start to be more honest and thereby that kind of breaking self deception in that way and see themselves in a more honest way, which means in that contradictory way of being both. We are both generous and mingy, we're both kind but also cruel to our partners. We do all those things and we have to condo see that in ourselves and just be more accepting of that.
- [44:19]
Helena Wiesing
Yeah, and I actually had that, there's a quote on exactly this that I really liked and underlined because the need for breaking the spell of self deception. I feel like in the book you really kind of unfold how important that is, particularly for relationships and bonds and, and you write about this topic of partnership or being in a couple. The ability to think of oneself as part of a couple is a developmental achievement. To be properly married, one must recognize a contradictory nature, accept oneself and one's beloved as both generous and frustrating, inventive and ordinary, loving and cruel. This developmental step is not stable. It is forever under threat from our desires.
- [45:14]
Stephen Grosz
It is, and I mean it's so hard because that's what I mean by love's labor too. It's ongoing having to think about that. You don't just get there and then, oh, I've got this person. I'm happy now, I'm home. It's lifelong that and it's the acceptance that that's a lifelong job and that your partner is also doing that too. And to be kind to each other in that and to think about it as a couple.
- [45:47]
Helena Wiesing
And this is also a view that is, I would say, like deeper and bringing in way more layers of the human experience and how hard it is because I mean, I think there's no shortage in our today's discourses about these like kind of, these ideas about relationship struggles as if like you just need to figure out a magic trick, like a technical issue and then we can have these relationships where it's all just clicking and working. And it's very frustrating to see how much of the, the, the, the, the conversations that, that kind of perpetuate that kind of illusion. But you, you're just, you're. There's. I see this in your. The. If I could take in some kind of message from the book. There's both this very sobering, very realistic, very clear. You're really showing the, the reader just how hard it is. And there's also this element of like, but it's, it's worth it. Like, you say we have the capacity for breaking that spell. We have the capacity to. Like you say it's a developmental step. Right. We can develop towards it and into it, but you're not over promising anything. And I just, I found that was very beautifully kind of held together. And I think it's something that is. Is missing from a lot of the conversations. It's. It's missing this confronting us with like, what it actually takes to get the relationships we want. Like, you also talk about gratitude. You, you say gratitude roots us in reality. To be grateful to someone is to recognize that we received something good from them and it makes them real to us. And I think many people today are really struggling with this.
- [47:42]
Stephen Grosz
Yeah. So I'm, I agree with what you're saying. I actually think there's a kind of intimacy when you recognize, oh, my partner is trying to do this too, and I'm trying to do this when you both feel, and you can talk about it, even that I misunderstood and I'm sorry. And to really talk about these things to me leads to just deeper and closer intimacy.
- [48:12]
Helena Wiesing
But like you say, it's not stable, it's forever under threat. So there is no happily ever after. This is lifelong. And I, I mean, you, you also mentioned this thing about time and how we step into a relationship with time when we engage with someone, someone as a real person and not just a. A fantasy. And I don't want to give too much away, but like, by the end, you. You kind of also address the topic of mortality. And I think a lot about that. And I mean, you've mentioned you disclosed your age yourself. I just wonder if there's also something about this at this time in your life in writing this book. And you allude a bit to it in the very end, in the epilogue, if you've had some thoughts about, you got to write this book in your lifetime.
- [49:06]
Stephen Grosz
Yeah. And I feel that. And I feel. I actually think a good psychoanalysis has to. I talk about binocular vision, which comes from a wonderful book by Helen Vendler. She was a professor of poetry at Harvard. She wrote a wonderful book about poets. It's a kind of collection of essays or lectures which she gave about poets after they've done their collected works and they keep writing. And it's that phase where their life's work is established and then they're still very alive, but they're aware of mortality. And she uses a phrase, binocular vision, meaning one lens on life right now as I'm living it and the present and being alive. But the other lens is on one's own personal extinction. Not death in general or somebody else's death or your mom or dad's death or anything like that, but that one day you will not exist. And I think a good analysis has to help people to have that binocular vision, to live a life where they are both present with each day, but also the realization that their life will end. And I think that helps to root us in reality and to be grateful for the things we get. Even just another day is another day to love and learn and live. It helps to root us in life in a way that I think a lot of other therapies that don't really take on mortality can't do that. I think analysis really is about being and our existence and then our non existence. And it's really a remarkable field or career work to be in. And because it has this at its center, ultimately, I think yes.
- [51:02]
Helena Wiesing
And I think that's a nice way to kind of land because I would say I'm very grateful that I got to have this conversation with you because it certainly for me feels like this gift of getting to interact with someone who is, you know, has gone through the life of a life committed to or dedicated to analysis. And very, very grateful to hear, like you, you had a connection with Dinora Pines. That's. That's amazing. I am very inspired by her. And also you. You've also met. You mentioned a couple times in the book. It was funny you mentioned Copenhagen and going to conferences. I happened. I grew up in Copenhagen, so that was fun to see those little details. So I'm very grateful. It was really a pleasure to talk with you. And I want us to end by just if. What might be next? What are other things.
- [52:03]
Stephen Grosz
I am working on another book. And the thing which I'm interested in is, of course, I'm interested on the problems which are at the very limit of our skill as analysts, which primarily are in things which Freud might have described as the death instinct for have been described in many different ways. But I'm particularly interested in when people don't change and a resistance to change, an attachment to suffering when suffering is more familiar and therefore safer than stepping into dependence or love or There are many different ways of looking, but I'm particularly interested in thinking about some of the most difficult problems that we work with from my cases. The cases that are Somebody once said that, of course, analysts write their cases about the ones that didn't work out as ways of trying to resolve. And that's probably what I'm doing. But those are the ones that I'm thinking about now and wanting to think about why they went the way they went.
- [53:15]
Helena Wiesing
Nice. I look very much forward to that. I feel like you also a little bit allude to those topics in this book.
- [53:24]
Stephen Grosz
Yes, I do. When we get stuck, that's an important theme as well. Yeah. And I just wanted to say it's wonderful also speaking to another clinician. It's fantastic. And the questions you asked are really excellent and the things that are to me most engaging. So thank you very much for such a great interview and discussion.
- [53:47]
Helena Wiesing
Yeah, thank you so much. Stephen.
- [53:57]
Stephen Grosz
Foreign.
- [54:02]
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