I was not surprised to find, in the Nobel Prize archives in Stockholm, that Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, in addition to having been nominated for several years for the Physiology or Medicine award, was also a candidate for the Literature award, also proposed by a French writer, Romain Rolland, the 1915 Nobel Prize winner. Therapists who know how to write are a perfect combination for literature: narrative talent and access to priceless human material. The British neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) demonstrated this with works such as The man who mistook his wife for a hat and many others.
Freud and Sacks are still the subject of heated controversies: whether they exaggerated cases, whether they invented certain aspects, whether or not their methods are effective… None of this detracts one bit from the literary appeal of their books, which can be read and enjoyed as novels if one prefers to suspend the credibility of what is narrated although it is difficult not to see the tons of reality and truth that lay behind their cases.
One of the latest contributions to this narrative of clinical cases is that of the American psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, whose writing has been praised by Nick Hornby and who publishes labors of love (Debate), a selection of patient stories – duly “anonymized”, as he says –, focused on love or sentimental issues, which the author intersperses with incidents from his own life.
The gallery of characters that parade through Stephen Grosz’s London office is worthy of a pleasant story book.
The gallery of characters that parade through the therapist’s London office is worthy of a pleasant story book: a bride who can’t decide to send the invitations for her wedding; a mathematician who is certain that his wife is cheating on him but who does not dare to ask it for fear that the marriage will break up; a kleptomaniac who tries to seduce the therapist; an advisor to Tony Blair married to a woman he loves, and with whom he has children, but who indulges in furtive homosexual encounters every week; a brilliant university professor who works as a sex worker; a nun who, after the age of 50, is considering leaving the convent… not to mention those conferences of psychoanalysts that the author attends and in which, for example, two speakers say nice things to each other like “you have to be less of a bitch and more of a psychoanalyst” or “you speak like a refrigerator magnet, with stupid slogans”, after having ended up next to the other’s husband.
Grosz treats the episodes with elegant distance, a kind of lucid asepsis that allows chaos to be ordered. And it reveals evidence that we do not usually accept: that at any moment, in these matters of love, we end up acting like children.
