The Tamesis
It was November 1989 and Sophie was engaged. Her fiancé Nick has already sent out half of his wedding invitations. Half of her invitations (60 in total) are in a tote bag under her desk. She couldn’t bring herself to mail them, and she didn’t know why. That’s not to say she doesn’t love him – she does, and she can’t wait to get married – but the invitation remains in the office. Eventually, a friend put her in touch with psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, hoping he could tell her why.
In a long and curious consultation, Sophie unpacks her childhood and the ways in which loss—in a way, another word for “change”—threatened her family. She was not afraid of marriage itself, but of the losses it might bring.
Because, as Grosz pointed out to me over Zoom some 35 years later, loss is the basis of life, and also the basis of love. “From a psychoanalytic perspective, development is about losing something you don’t want to lose [in order] Own something new. “When it came to making this exchange, some were more reluctant than others. After an initial consultation, Sophie sent out invitations over the weekend.
Grosz’s new book, labor of loverecounts this and many other meetings in his work as a psychoanalyst over the past several decades. We’re introduced to people who have had affairs; who find themselves in on-off relationships; who sabotage their relationships because of paranoia; who are constantly dating different versions of the same person. If Grosz’s first book, scrutinizing lifeall about his patients’ personal lives and struggles, labor of love— written in a similar vein, as a series of case studies — specifically more interested in the way his patients approached love. Why do we behave the way we do? What does this mean for all of us?
As someone who is extremely obsessed with the details of other people’s personal lives and relationships, I couldn’t wait to see what Grosz was thinking. That’s all we talk about.
Fashion:Why did you decide to write this book?
Stephen Grosz: I came up with this book because I realized that with my patients, we were getting something very different from how people usually think about love. People come up and tell me stories. This is also how psychoanalysis works because, when my students read case histories, Storytelling It truly moves you, so it also had to be written as a story. I started thinking about how I wanted to write in this field, with love, work that was really about it.
You mentioned that over the course of your marriage you will go through phases of hating each other. Why do you think some people choose to divorce while others insist on divorce?
Interestingly enough, I’ve had men come into my room – more men – who have remarried different women, but what they should have done is remarried the woman they started with.
In many cases, [divorce] This might be a good idea – I can’t tell. But sometimes, it’s possible for people to actually change and break the false narratives they’ve created around themselves about others. If you can do that, you can remarry [that same person]. That’s not how most books talk about marriage, so I wanted to do that. This is what I see my patients doing. In fact, they are teaching me all of this.
So perhaps the longest-lasting marriages are those where two people allow each other to change.
