Love’s Labour review: How psychoanalysis can help and hinder us in understanding our messy love lives

Grosz describes the beginning of her analysis and then she stops coming. More than 20 years later she gets in touch. She needs to see him. “I need to decide whether or not to end my marriage.”

Here and elsewhere in the book, Grosz presents us with someone’s problem. Sophie A. can’t decide whether she wants to marry her fiancé. Then, many years later, she can’t decide whether she wants to divorce the same man to whom she’s been married for all this time. What is going on here? This seems a very everyday set of choices but the more they are discussed, the more complicated they become.

This is true of all the case histories in the book. Dr Ravi M. is a maths lecturer. There is a problem with his marriage. He is convinced his wife has been having an affair but he is terrified that if he confronts her with this, he will lose his family. Again, time passes. The situation becomes much darker. There is a dramatic twist. Again and again, what seem to be stories about love turn out to be about something else.

Later in the book, Grosz describes another case, this time presented by a fellow analyst at a conference. “Her patient was difficult… [she] seemed to want the psychoanalysis to fail.” It’s striking how many of the patients Grosz writes about are “difficult”, even when they seem eager to please. Equally striking is the question of when psychoanalysis fails and why. These questions haunt some of the stories in Grosz’s fascinating book. What is the difference between patients who are “difficult” but treatable and patients whose difficulties can’t be resolved and the analysis fails?

This leads to a third striking feature. These stories are about love and the difficulties of achieving love. But as the book moves on it increasingly becomes about death and patients who can’t talk about this so talk about love instead. One patient “thought that his problem was how to find love. His real problem was to accept the fact that one day he will lose it”. Not because he will break up with someone, but because they will die and his childhood was full of death.

Perhaps the most astonishing insight of all comes when Grosz quotes the French analyst André Green, who wrote about what he called “the dead mother”. Green doesn’t mean a mother who is physically dead, but someone who is “emotionally absent, lifeless at a critical moment in their child’s development”. Many of the patients in Love’s Labour are still trying to deal with such problems.

Grosz is a fine storyteller. Here, as in The Examined Life, he has written a humane and compelling book, full of astonishing insights into his patients’ lives – and the lives they cannot live.

Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz

Chatto & Windus