This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Josh Cohen, who is a literary critic and a psychoanalyst, whose book is called

Not Working Why We Have to Stop. And it's a kind of very thoughtful blend of memoir and literary

analysis and literary history and psychoanalytic theory about work. Why we're doing too much of it and why when we're not doing it,

we're not not doing it right, if I hope that's a roughly fair summation.

Josh, can you sort of start by talking a bit about the germ of this book?

Because it feels like it could have come out of your experience in the consulting room

or it could have come out of, you know, your own experience of staring out of the window.

Yeah, I think there are a number of different sources.

And actually, I think the first one, which I suppose is nicely constant with the way that a book coming out of psychoanalysis should be is probably my

childhood where really my abiding memory is of being told perpetually in the home and particularly

at school that I was hopelessly dreamy sluggish and sort of unavailable to the call of urgency.

I remember particularly memorably one report telling my parents that I had no sense of urgency.

And I think it's that sense of being persecuted, really, by a regime that seemed to assume that very quick, almost stimulus response to whatever was being asked of you.

A kind of short circuit of thinking, of reflection, of anything that might stand in the way

of the request and its execution was, if not outlawed, then certainly disapproved of.

And that seemed to me to run against the grain of really who I was without of course

being able to articulate it that clearly to myself but you describe the introduction how you know

as your clients come in very often you're seeing as they're anxious about work they're

defining themselves through work,

but also that, you know, the consulting room becomes a sort of tentatively safe, you know,

...