Love\u2019s Labour is a book about love, but if you pick it up hoping for relationship tips, you may be disappointed. The author is the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz, and part of the thrill of this reading experience is that it feels transgressive: Grosz invites you inside the closed space of his consulting room and allows you to eavesdrop on the most private, painful moments of his patients\u2019 lives. Grosz uses his clients\u2019 romantic problems to pose questions about love \u2013 but the cases in this book are so hauntingly strange that there can be no easy answers. In one chapter, Grosz tells the story of a 15-year-old girl who begins a passionate sexual affair with her uncle. In another, he writes about a man unable to recover after a funeral ritual in which he was invited to hold his dead fiancee\u2019s skull in his hands.<\/p>\n
This is the follow-up to Grosz\u2019s best\ufeffselling 2013 book The Examined Life, which also collected insights from Grosz\u2019s decades treating patients. Love\u2019s Labour has a narrower focus, but \ufeffalso feels more expansive: Grosz includes fewer patients, but writes about them in more detail. He offers multiple, often conflicting interpretations of each patient\u2019s problems, although crucially, he doesn\u2019t try to solve them. He doesn\u2019t give them advice; instead, he invites them to take part in a series of thought experiments. Writing about the grieving patient who held his girlfriend\u2019s skull, he explores the idea that this man somehow \u201ccaught\u201d death \u2013 became deadened himself \u2013 in the moment he touched his beloved\u2019s bones.<\/p>\n
This chapter doesn\u2019t read like an account of a professional treating a patient\ufeff; in Grosz\u2019s precise, spare prose, it unfolds like a thrilling piece of magical realism. And yet a small, s\ufeffceptical part of me felt frustrated with the wildness of the analysis. Similarly, Grosz\u2019s interpretation of the girl who falls in love with her uncle left me unpersuaded. The girl begins her affair after the death of her father, but Grosz doesn\u2019t consider that she could be looking for a father figure in her uncle. That would be too easy\ufeff. \ufeffHe argues, rather bafflingly, that she wants to have sex\u00a0with her uncle because she sees him as a \u201cmother\u201d.<\/p>\n
Though I wasn\u2019t convinced by all of Grosz\u2019s insights, I still found it heartening that he refuses predictable interpretations. As talking therapy \u2013 once taboo \u2013 has become mainstream, the way we think about love has become less nuanced and more prescriptive. On social media, it is common to self-diagnose \ufeffas an \u201canxiously\ufeff attached love addict\u201d, or an \u201cavoidant commitmentphobe\u201d with the finality\u00a0that you might announce the news \ufeffyou have terminal cancer. This way of talking about love leaves no room for multiplicity\ufeff or recovery: if you\u2019re an \u201cavoidant\u201d you are irrevocably that way\ufeff; all your romantic problems stem from that one fatal flaw. Love\u2019s Labour provides an antidote to such rigid ways of thinking. Grosz is quietly committed to the idea that human beings are too complicated to be easily labelled.<\/p>\n
The juiciest chapter tells the story of two psychoanalysts \u2013 Cora and Susan \u2013 who fall out spectacularly \ufeffwhen Cora runs off with Susan\u2019s husband\ufeff. Grosz uses his colleagues\u2019 love triangle to question the very purpose of psychoanalysis. Should a psychoanalyst seek to morally improve the patient \u2013 and make \ufeffthem the kind of \ufeffperson who doesn\u2019t steal another\u2019s \ufeffspouse? Or should the analyst help the patient to self-actualise, so \ufeffthey can identify what makes \ufeffthem happy, and hunt that happiness down? Grosz\u2019s answer is typically confounding. The psychoanalyst, in his view, shouldn\u2019t seek to \u201chelp\u201d the patient at all. Instead, the patient must learn to think for \ufeffhis or herself. Reading Grosz\u2019s conclusion, I heard that small, s\ufeffceptical voice again: \ufeffif your psychoanalyst won\u2019t even try to help you, why on earth should you pay them? But Grosz\u2019s insights tend to grow on you. There is something empowering about his faith in people. He believes we have the ability to heal ourselves.<\/p>\n
Grosz is quietly committed to the idea that human beings are too complicated to be easily labelled<\/p>\n
Love\u2019s Labour suggests the psychoanalyst should function more as a witness than a health practitioner. The consulting room should be a space where the patient is able to explore conflicting sides of his or herself, and the psychoanalyst\u2019s only real job is to try to see those conflicts clearly. In this way, Grosz\u2019s ideal psychoanalyst is markedly similar to his ideal lover. The only thing remotely close to a mantra that Grosz repeats is that we must accept our lover\u2019s \u201ccontradictory nature\u201d. Instead of seeking to improve them, we should try to accept them as \u201cboth generous and frustrating, inventive and ordinary, loving and cruel\u201d.<\/p>\n
Before I read this book, I thought of love as a kind of dream state. I thought that falling and staying in love was dependent on maintaining a degree of delusion about your partner. You don\u2019t see your lover in quite the same way as a stranger sees them, because the lover is warped \u2013 wonderfully \u2013 by the intensity of your feeling for them. You gaze at them through rose-tinted goggles. The \u201clabour\u201d of Grosz\u2019s title is the work of kissing goodbye to all flattering delusions\ufeff and trying to see your lover clearly. Grosz makes this labour sound daunting\ufeff but rewarding.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m single right now, and I don\u2019t know whether next time I\u2019m in a relationship I\u2019ll have the courage to be able to gaze at any hypothetical partner, and have them gaze at me, without goggles on. But reading this book makes me want to try.<\/p>\n