The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy

✍ Scribed by J. M. Coetzee; Arabella Kurtz

• Book ID: 100067297
• Publisher: Viking;Penguin Publishing Group
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 122 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN: 1846558891

✦ Synopsis

**J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus , is now available
from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018.

J.M. Coetzee: What relationship do I have with my life history? Am I its
conscious author, or should I think of myself as simply a voice uttering with
as little interference as possible a stream of words welling up from my
interior?**

Arabella Kurtz: One way of thinking about psychoanalysis is to say that it
is aimed at setting free the narrative or autobiographical imagination.

The Good Story is a fascinating dialogue about psychotherapy and the
art of storytelling between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral
psychology and a psychotherapist with training in literary studies. Coetzee
and Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different
perspectives, but at the heart of both of their approaches is a concern with
narrative. Working alone, the writer is in control of the story he or she
tells. The therapist, on the other hand, collaborates with the patient in
developing an account of the patient's life and identity that is both
meaningful and true.

In a meeting of minds that is illuminating and thought-provoking, the authors
discuss both individual psychology and the psychology of the group: the school
classroom, gangs and the settler nation, in which the brutal deeds of
ancestors are accommodated into a national story. Drawing on great writers
like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein,
Coetzee and Kurtz explore the human capacity for self-examination, our wish to
tell our own life stories and the resistances we encounter along the way.

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