The good story
Subtitle: exchanges on truth, fiction and psychotherapy
By: J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz
Contributors: Kurtz, Arabella, author
Publisher: Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9780525429517
Copyright date: 2015
Subjects: Psychotherapy; Psychotherapy and literature
Description: "The Good Story" is an exchange between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with a training in literary studies. Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a concern with stories. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in telling the story of their life. What kind of truth do the stories created by patient and therapist aim to uncover: objective truth or the shifting and subjective truth of memories explored and re-experienced in the safety of the therapeutic relationship? The authors discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school classroom, the gang, the settler nation where the brutal deeds of the ancestors have to be accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, they offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.
Notes: First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker.