A middle-aged woman, Sophie, has recently discovered that her husband is having an affair. He breaks it off and wants to recommit to their marriage, but Sophie isn’t sure. She starts psychoanalysis. In analysis she’s receptive and grateful for the analyst’s attention, but she’s also fifteen minutes late for every session. Before Sophie was born, her parents had another daughter who died in infancy; Sophie was their ‘little miracle’ who came along after they had given up hope of having more children. Yet her parents were oddly disengaged from their daughter: they never learned her friends’ names, forgot which A levels she was doing and sent her to school in the wrong uniform. How can Sophie’s past (the death of her baby sister, her parents’ remoteness) explain the present (her oddly consistent lateness, her uncertainty whether to remain married)? 

Love’s Labour presents a series of psychoanalytic case studies, including one centred on Sophie, drawn from Stephen Grosz’s four decades of clinical experience. As in his previous book, The Examined Life (2013), many of the case studies take up only a few pages. Some patients have common predicaments (one man says he longs for a partner, yet keeps dating women transparently wrong for him), while others’ predicaments are more recherché (a university lecturer is depressed because she misses her time as a sex worker). In each case, analyst and patient work together to answer the same question that Grosz asks about Sophie: how can the patient’s past explain the present? The answers are simultaneously familiar – they fuck you up, your mum and dad – and unsettling: a man’s inability to feel hate, for instance, is preventing him from being truly present with his wife.

Grosz intersperses patients’ stories with descriptions of episodes and figures from his own life: his experience of being in analysis, his teachers, his time caring for his dying mother. He reflects, too, on his own mortality (he is now in his seventies). The book’s unifying theme is expressed by the