Stephen Grosz, "Love's Labour: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love" (Vintage, 2026)

When it comes to love why do we find things so difficult? Drawing on over forty years of candid and surprising conversations with his patients, Stephen Grosz asks, what gets in the way of our falling in love? And what must we do to stay there?In the intimate space of the consulting room, we meet the woman who can't post her wedding invitations but then, decades later, can't decide whether to get divorced; the friendship group that explodes when an adulterous affair begins; and the man whose partner's death is almost too much to bear.As an analyst, Grosz's unerring ability is to locate what ails the heartsick. As a writer, he elegantly shows how we can deploy the agonies of love as tools for understanding.The labour of love is the work of a lifetime but in finally learning to see ourselves and our world clearly, we find we are truly ready to love one another. Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst - he has worked with patients for more than forty years. Born in America, he was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His Number One Sunday Times bestseller, The Examined Life, has been translated into more than thirty languages. Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California and Associate Professor at California Institute of Integral Studies. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member!

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Stephen Grosz, "Love's Labour: How We Break and Make the Bonds of Love" (Vintage, 2026) is an episode from New Books in Psychoanalysis by New Books Network.

This episode is 53:35 long.

This episode was published on Apr 6, 2026.

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