He makes a list of different ideas that have struck him from his reading and training, among them: to make what is unconscious conscious (Freud); to break the spell of self-deception (Amadeo Limentani); to tolerate ambivalent feelings and experience the world with less fear and fragmentation (Melanie Klein); to wrest knowledge from suffering (Jonathan Lear).
[W]e live, it may fairly be said, in post-psychoanalytic times. The interior life, predicated on a measured reflectiveness, has largely yielded to the instantaneous responses and public enactments of social media. Psychoanalysis, which from the 1940s through the ’70s was de rigueur for serious-minded people of every stripe, lost its sheen and became an object of mockery as the culture moved toward a more externalized, Oprah-ized approach to the self, in which mortifying secrets were uttered aloud instead of in the confines of a therapist’s office.
Psychoanalysis, in other words, wasn’t simply a sociological fad, something that was destined to become passé as newer fashions came in. One may argue about its scientific validity ad infinitum, but there is no denying the power of many of its foundational insights. Or as the literary critic Harold Bloom once put it: “Throwing Freud out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us. His mythology of the mind has survived his supposed science, and his metaphors are impossible to evade.”
“Psychoanalysis,” Grosz observes, “is two people not knowing together.” If one reason people go into therapy is to feel perceived and retained in the mind of another person (to, quite simply, tell their story to an attentive other), it helps to have someone curious sitting across from you (or behind you, in the case of classic Freudian analysis, where the analyst sits out of sight four or five times a week, listening and occasionally saying something). “When we cannot find a way of telling our story,” Grosz notes, “our story tells us — we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”
Loving fully, he contends, often challenges our rigid notions of family structure or of what being in a couple might mean. “I’m convinced that the ability to think of oneself as part of a couple is a developmental achievement,” he writes. “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.”
“And it’s a challenge that lies at the very limit of our skill: how to help someone who is unconsciously determined to undo their own improvement.” Over the past century, he said, “psychoanalysis has learned a great deal about it. What is harder — and remains the central clinical question — is understanding why this patient, at this moment, is determined to continue suffering.”
“For many people, what we know best is suffering. Our suffering. And people stay there. They stay there because it’s familiar and because it’s safe. But if I can get them to start looking at it the way we’re talking right now, that spell can be loosened.”
I have always been struck by Freud’s pessimistic definition of one of psychoanalysis’s primary goals, which is to convert hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness. In one of my last questions, I asked Grosz over email what he thinks makes for actual happiness, having begun to wonder if the answer is to lower one’s expectations and call it a day. “I would say that happiness is the sweetness of desiring what you have,” he wrote me, “fully aware of its fragility, its brevity and its limits. It isn’t the absence of sadness, but the capacity to hold reality without needing it to be otherwise.”