The Examined Life

**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**

This is a book about change, and learning how to better understand your own emotions and behaviour.

In his work as a practicing psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz has spent the last twenty-five years uncovering the hidden feelings behind our most baffling behaviour. The Examined Life distils over 50,000 hours of conversation into psychological insight – without the jargon.

This is an extraordinary book about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. These are stories about everyday lives: from the neatly-loaded dishwasher that betrays an affair to the reasons why a young man intentionally loses his wallet to the more extreme examples: the patient who points an unloaded gun at a police officer and the compulsive liar who convinces his wife he's dying of cancer.

The resulting journey will spark new ideas about who we are and why we do what we do.

'A captivating journey... These are universal themes, insights into an emotional world we inhabit, often with equal difficulty. A wonderful book' Sunday Times

‘Stephen Grosz, an analyst with more than 40 years in practice, is one of the best at writing about [psychoanalysis]’ The Times