Bestselling author of The Examined Life
STEPHEN
GROSZ
They had loved and hated,
but they were still a couple, still doing
love’s labour
LOVE’S LABOUR
also by stephen grosz
The Examined Life
LOVE’S LABOUR
stephen grosz
Chatto & Windus
London
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First published by Chatto & Windus in 2025
Copyright © Stephen Grosz 2025
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To my family, with love
For one person to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
rainer maria rilke, letters to a young poet
Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love.
iris murdoch, the bell
Prologue: Surrender
It is January 1983, the first Monday after New Year’s. Dark skies; pounding, icy rain. Harley Street is filled with taxis. When the traffic lights change, the taxis don’t move. There is nowhere for them to go. Umbrellas bob at odd angles, their users tilting to avoid collisions.
I find 5 Upper Wimpole Street and ring the bell. The receptionist shows me into a waiting room lit by several standing lamps. There is a coal fire in the fireplace. Dark floorboards, a large rug. I sit at the far side of the room so I can watch the door.
To become a psychoanalyst, you must have an analysis yourself, and this training analysis will have a profound effect on the way you do the work – how could it be otherwise? I am waiting to begin my first psychoanalytic session.
At exactly 9 a.m., Dr Limentani appears. He gives a small smile and nods. He shows me into a modest room even warmer than the waiting room, and sits down in his chair behind the psychoanalytic couch.
‘Make yourself comfortable. There’s the chair or the couch.’ He pauses. ‘I think the couch is more comfortable.’
Looking back forty years to the start of my life as a psychoanalyst, I remember the shift from outside noise to quiet, from cold to warm. I also remember who I was.
I was thirty-one years old and immature. I was impulsive and quick to fall in love, and often confused intensity with intimacy. I thought I was clear-eyed, but I saw love through the limited and limiting storylines of popular culture. I talked to my friends as if love was a position best filled by a committee. I believed that if I could just find the ‘right’ person, happiness would automatically follow.
There was so much I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand that each of us is responsible for our own happiness. That if I didn’t treat myself with consideration and care, chances are a good many others wouldn’t treat me that way either.
I didn’t understand pain. I thought the many kinds of pain we suffer when we love another person – longing, anxiety, grief – were feelings to avoid, symptoms to be removed. I didn’t understand that pain is the finest instrument we possess for knowing what we desire.
We deceive ourselves about love – the who, what and why. But we also have the power to undo self-deception. Love’s labour is the work we must do to see clearly ourselves and our loved ones. It is our attempt to join the world as it is. ‘Love,’ Iris Murdoch writes,
‘is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.’ She goes on: ‘Love is the discovery of reality.’
My first lesson in love: a distinction between surrender and submission.
I lay down on Dr Limentani’s couch and was surprised by my own tears. For most of the first session, I could hardly speak. I think now that this was a response (one which I have since observed in my own patients) to the relief of knowing that someone was there to listen to me, and that he would be there the next day and the day after that, for as long as I wanted to come.
When I did find my voice – a few days later – I spoke to my psychoanalyst about my Oedipus complex, my projections and introjections; my transference and his counter- transference. I gave him my take on Freud and Lacan, Klein and Winnicott. I told him what I thought about recent articles in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. He let me carry on in this way for some time, until finally, a few weeks in, he asked, ‘Have you noticed that you talk more about psychoanalytic theory than I do?’
What was he suggesting? ‘Isn’t it in the Introductory Lectures that Freud says clinical practice is built upon psychoanalytic theory?’ I asked.
‘Well, we could talk about psychoanalytic theory,’ he said. ‘But where does that leave you ?’ And, on another occasion: ‘Why do
you always come to your sessions accompanied by Freud, or one of the greats of psychoanalysis? Why are you so frightened to be here on your own?’
At the time I thought that Dr Limentani was suggesting that, by embracing psychoanalytic theory, I was dating the wrong girl, that I should be hanging with clinical psychoanalysis, the experience itself. As it turns out, Dr Limentani was beginning to untangle something that was so much a part of me I couldn’t see it.
In addition to my fussy expounding on psychoanalytic theory, I was incredibly – maybe compulsively – obedient as a patient: I was never late, never missed a session, paid my bill the day I received it. Dr Limentani saw my desire to please him, to do everything I thought he wanted me to do. Over time, in a series of clear, piercing interpretations, he pointed out to me that I believed that if I submitted to him – if I became the patient I imagined he wanted me to be – he would accept me, and this acceptance would lift me, heal me, return me to my life.
I was approaching Dr Limentani just as I had approached so many other people who were important to me. I wanted him to take a shine to me, in the hope that his acceptance – his love – would change me. Through his interpretations, I came to see that this was more than an underlying pattern in my life: it was my life.
It became clear to me that there is a vital distinction to be made between surrendering to something (or someone) and submitting to it. This distinction is something that could have saved
me some suffering if I’d considered it sooner. To surrender is to let go, to experience a release. When two people surrender to each other, they feel alive, empowered, accepted. They feel love. Submission, or submissiveness, is different. It too begins with a longing to be loved – and yet, submitting to another person leaves us feeling like we’ve fallen under their control. Submission is transactional: I’ll give you what you want – be what you want – in return, you will love me. Because this deal is unrealisable, it’s doomed, and submission is usually accompanied by feelings of resignation or depression.
Eventually, when I was able to trust Dr Limentani and to leave all of my theorising outside – to surrender to the analysis – I found that I did not often break down in tears. (I also found that the world didn’t come to an end when I did cry.) I had other things to say. I don’t remember my precise words and his responses; I must have spoken about what was going on in my life – breaking up with a girlfriend, my feelings about my research and training, my mother’s cancer. With his quiet insistence on hearing my feelings, dreams and associations, Dr Limentani brought me into the slow work of drawing a map of my internal world. Here is desire; here is envy; here, in this place, is sadness.
Gradually the communication between my internal and external worlds improved – and I experienced this as a release. I found I was better able to make sense of things that once had been mysterious. More than that, I felt less lonely, no longer up against a wall.
I began my psychoanalysis with the belief that, from the start, Dr Limentani knew what I was all about – that to be a psychoanalyst is to know already. The very opposite is true: psychoanalysis is a particular form of not knowing. Psychoanalysis is two people not knowing together. The process of psychoanalysis is to think together, find meaning together. The only way he could get to know me – that we could get to know me – was through talking and listening.
Marry Me
1
Looking now at my Filofax from 1989, I see that I had planned to spend the last Saturday in November in Cambridge, at Kettle’s Yard. I wanted to see an exhibition of paintings. That plan was scrapped when, late Friday night, I got a call from Sophie A.
Sophie had been given my number by a friend and felt she needed to talk to someone urgently. She and her fiancé, Nicholas – Nick – had spent the previous weekend addressing their wedding invitations. On Monday morning, he’d taken his half of the invitations and posted them. The sixty invitations that Sophie was responsible for were still at her office, in a carrier bag under her desk. She couldn’t bring herself to post them, or to bring them home, or to tell Nick about any of it. She wasn’t sure what to do. She wasn’t even sure she should be ringing me. I offered her a consultation for the next day.
On Saturday, Sophie didn’t appear for her appointment. After fifteen minutes, I assumed that she had finally sent the invitations, or had talked to her fiancé and was now living through the
The woman on my doorstep was tall and stylish. Her straight dark hair was cut in a geometric chin-length bob. She wore wirerimmed glasses. With the exception of her jeans, everything she had on was black. She stepped with some hesitancy into the consulting room. Without taking off her coat, Sophie sat down on the edge of the chair opposite me and apologised several times for being late. She explained that she’d stopped off at her parents’ house. She had wanted to tell them about the invitations, but, once there, she hadn’t been able to.
‘I’m probably frightened of their reaction,’ she said. ‘They really like Nick.’ She apologised to me again. She wasn’t herself, she said. She worked as an arts correspondent for a national newspaper. She was a responsible person, not indecisive or impulsive.
‘Has anything like this ever happened to you before?’ I asked.
‘Never,’ she said.
She told me about her relationship with Nick. They had met through friends, made it through an early wobble when she thought he might still be interested in an old girlfriend. They had always had good sexual chemistry. Of course, there were things that bothered her. He had just been hired as a history lecturer at a London university, and she thought he worked too much. They had the usual squabbles about the dishes and housework. He was still a bit of an adolescent, but weren’t all men?
8 consequences. I was in the small kitchen next to my consulting room, making a cup of coffee and opening the post, when my doorbell rang.
‘I can’t be easy to live with,’ she said. ‘I expect him to be as well organised as I am. If I send him to the supermarket for ten things and he comes back with eight of them, it’s hard for me to hide my frustration. My “should have done it myself” face.’
But Nick didn’t get upset with her about this sort of thing, she said. Other boyfriends had. She sat forward in her chair. She unbuttoned her coat and pushed it back off her shoulders. ‘Mr Grosz, I do love Nick. I don’t want anyone else. I just don’t know what’s happening to me. I feel afraid.’
Sophie had grown up in Notting Hill, near the Portobello Road, where her parents owned an antiques business. They did architectural salvage – chimneypieces, door furniture, floors, garden ornaments, lighting, mirrors, textiles and carpets. She felt absolutely terrible that she hadn’t been able to tell them about the wedding invitations. She usually told her parents everything. She was an only child, and very close to her parents.
I asked Sophie about her eating and sleeping. She said she’d been waking up early, feeling anxious, and having terrible dreams. The night before had been awful. Fearful that she was going to miss our appointment, she’d woken up again and again to check her alarm clock. At some point, near morning, she fell into a deep sleep and had a dream.
‘I dreamed I was in a changing room with my mum and dad. We were all supposed to undress and go through to the showers. Somehow, I realised that we were going to be gassed. There was nothing I could do. We couldn’t stay in the changing room. We
had to go forward, through the door. We were all going to die.’ She looked at me. ‘And then I woke up.’
‘Why would I dream something like that?’ she asked me. My silence seemed to make Sophie uncomfortable.
She hesitated, then she told me that she wasn’t Jewish, Nick wasn’t either. This subject – the Holocaust – was not something she’d been thinking about. A few months back, just after Primo Levi died, she’d seen a documentary on television about him, and she’d read one of his books, but that was a while ago. Her dream made no sense to her. We sat facing each other in silence.
After a minute or two, I asked her what she’d been thinking. She twisted her engagement ring, told me she was embarrassed, and hoped that I wouldn’t take it the wrong way, but when her friend had suggested that she come and see me, she’d had the thought that I might be Jewish. Grosz is a Jewish name, isn’t it? She’d thought about Freud. He was Jewish. Sophie stopped. ‘I sound terrible. I don’t know why I dreamed about the Holocaust.’
My intuition was that Sophie’s dream wasn’t about concentration camps, the Holocaust or Jewishness – her anxiety suggested some anticipated, internal calamity. And yet, although she was offering her associations honestly, freely, and although the dream itself seemed simple, I had to admit, I was struggling to find a way into it. I felt stuck.
I remembered a passage in Freud – if he couldn’t disentangle a patient’s dream, he would ask the patient to repeat it. Ordinarily,