A Sunday Times bestseller Longlisted for the Guardian first book award A Radio 4 Book of the Week. This book is about learning to live. In simple stories of encounter between a psychoanalyst and his patients, The Examined Life reveals how the art of insight can illuminate the most complicated, confounding and human of experiences. 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.

‘I want to change, but not if it means changing, a patient once said to me in complete innocence

What do we do when we find ourselves trapped by our own thoughts or behaviour? Drawing on his twenty-five years’ experience as a psychoanalyst, Stephen Grosz ushers the reader through the door of his consulting room and into the minds of his patients. In these beautifully told cases we find compulsive liars, deceived spouses, violent children and delusional adults but we also find ourselves and in doing so, understand a little more about what it is to be human.