The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves

This looks like a great read and definitely one that I'll be adding to my wish list!  

 

Here's the book's blurb - 'This book is about change.'

"We are all storytellers – we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen.

In his work as a practising 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 pure psychological insight, without the jargon.

This extraordinary book is about one ordinary process: talking, listening and understanding. Its aphoristic and elegant stories teach us a new kind of attentiveness. They also unveil a delicate self-portrait of the analyst at work, and show how lessons learned in the consulting room can reveal as much to him as to the patient.

These are stories about our everyday lives: they are about the people we love and the lies that we tell; the changes we bear, and the grief. Ultimately, they show us not only how we lose ourselves but how we might find ourselves too."

For me, what is most interesting is the way the author shows the value of storytelling and how quintessential it is to our lives. From the oral tradition of sitting around a campfire exchanging shards of broken lives, to the great tomes that make up literature proper, stories are as indispensable to our lives as oxygen. Stories, whether us telling our own, or listening to others, heal us in ways we have rarely really ever understood, till now.