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A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.
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.
About the author
J. M. Coetzee, geb. 1940 in Kapstadt, lehrte von 1972 bis 2002 als Literaturprofessor in seiner Heimatstadt und gehört zu den bedeutendsten Autoren der Gegenwart. Er wurde für seine Romane und sein umfangreiches essayistisches Werk mit vielen internationalen Preisen ausgezeichnet, u. a. zweimal mit dem Booker Prize. 22003 wurde ihm der Nobelpreis für Literatur verliehen. Coetzee lebt seit 2002 in Adelaide, Australien.
Summary
A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist. 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?
Foreword
A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.
Report
It is the Man Booker prize-winning novelist's agenda that drives the absorbing discussions of this book. Kurtz's pieces are replies to Coetzee's questions, and as such are insightful for both [psychoanalysis and novel-writing] Gerard Woodward Independent
