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Extract from The Good Story : Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Pschoanalytic Psychotherapy, by J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, to be published by Harvill Secker in May 2015.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
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The Good Story : Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Pschoanalytic Psychotherapy
London
:
Harvill Secker
,
2015
7974306
2015
single work
criticism
'A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-wining writer and a psychotherapist.
'The Good Story is an exchange between a great writer with a long-standing interest in human psychology and a distinguished psychotherapist who has long been passionate about literature.
'Arabella Kurtz and J.M. Coetzee consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches are language and story. Working alone, the writer is in sole charge of the story he or she tells. The therapist collaborates with the patient on the story of their life. Are they seeking an absolute truth or a fiction that will help the patient to overcome their distress?
'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 several generations back have to be accommodated into the national story. They draw on the work of great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky as well as canonical writers on psychoanalysis such as Freud and Melanie Klein. Their discussion provides an illuminating insight into the stories we tell of our lives.' (Publication summary)
Works about this Work
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[Review Essay] J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story : Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Anglia : Zeitschrift Fur Englische Philologie , June vol. 135 no. 2 2017;Coetzee's outstanding position within contemporary literature may be put down to an apparently conflicting intellectual stance. Coetzee, for one thing, has always cherished a transpersonal (if not metaphysical) category of truth: "We are born", he writes in 1992. "with the idea of the truth' (DP 395). Brought up in a South-African society with racist and various other sociocultural forms of discrimination, a sensitive liberal such as Coetzee must be accurate when it becomes inevitable to draw boundaries and assign responsibility. On account of his colonial heritage. with Polish and German forbears, an Afrikaans family (and an Anglo-American sense of values),Coetzee is related more to the perpetrators than the victims. Under the apartheid-regime he was forced to cope with the pailful distortion of the truth through state censorship, while his extensive reading of 19th'century Russian moralists had a formative influence on his unwavering moral outlook which presupposes knowledge of what is true or false, right or wrong.' (Introduction)
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[Review Essay] J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz. The Good Story : Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Anglia : Zeitschrift Fur Englische Philologie , June vol. 135 no. 2 2017;Coetzee's outstanding position within contemporary literature may be put down to an apparently conflicting intellectual stance. Coetzee, for one thing, has always cherished a transpersonal (if not metaphysical) category of truth: "We are born", he writes in 1992. "with the idea of the truth' (DP 395). Brought up in a South-African society with racist and various other sociocultural forms of discrimination, a sensitive liberal such as Coetzee must be accurate when it becomes inevitable to draw boundaries and assign responsibility. On account of his colonial heritage. with Polish and German forbears, an Afrikaans family (and an Anglo-American sense of values),Coetzee is related more to the perpetrators than the victims. Under the apartheid-regime he was forced to cope with the pailful distortion of the truth through state censorship, while his extensive reading of 19th'century Russian moralists had a formative influence on his unwavering moral outlook which presupposes knowledge of what is true or false, right or wrong.' (Introduction)
