Sunday, May 4, 2014

Five self-help books for people who don't do self-help

Stephen Grosz is a practicing psychoanalyst—he has worked with patients for more than twenty-five years. Born in America, educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford University, he teaches at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. He lives in London.

His stories have appeared in the Financial Times Weekend Magazine and Granta.

A Sunday Times bestseller, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves is his first book.

For the Telegraph, Grosz named five books "that can move us to empathy, to courage, to love," including:
Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988) is a series of posthumously published lectures on the inner qualities Calvino imagined we’d need in the years after 2000. These include quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency – but lightness is the most important. Lightness isn’t ignorance, but a serious point of view requiring insight and understanding, "a value, rather than a defect."
Read about the other books on Grosz's list.

--Marshal Zeringue