All in the mind | 10 January 2013

Radio 4’s Book of the Week sounded so promising, pertinent, perfect for these gloomy first days of January. Maybe listening to it day-by-day could help to banish those demons of despair and disillusion which become so virulent after festive over-indulgence and the onset of the New Year? What better antidote to the dank outside than the positive thoughts and advice of an expert psychoanalyst, you might think. But although Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life was beautifully read by Peter Marinker — a voice that’s easy on the ear yet always fluent with meaning — it felt empty, without relevance. Grosz promised us solutions to those feelings of being trapped, imprisoned, walled in by life. He said he could help us to make sense of how we feel by explaining the stories we devise to explain, reconcile, live with what we are. But in the end his sequence of case-studies of patients he has treated were just stories of unfortunate people with a common theme — unhappy and abused childhoods.