The Good Story
  • Published: 21 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781473512290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208

The Good Story

Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy

Formats & editions
EBook
21 May 2015
Paperback
1 Aug 2016
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A fascinating dialogue on the human inclination to make up stories between a Nobel Prize-winning writer and a psychotherapist.

The Good Story is an exchange between a writer with a longstanding interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with a training in literary studies. J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz 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?

Drawing on great writers like Cervantes and Dostoevsky and on psychoanalysts like Freud and Melanie Klein, the authors offer illuminating insights into the stories we tell of our lives.
  • Published: 21 May 2015
  • ISBN: 9781473512290
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 208
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About the authors

J. M. Coetzee

J. M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg,Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide.

Arabella Kurtz

Arabella Kurtz is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and is completing psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic. She has held various posts in NHS adult and forensic mental health services and is currently Senior Clinical Tutor on the University of Leicester clinical psychology training course.

portrait photo of Arabella Kurtz

Praise for The Good Story

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

Coetzee and Kurtz range freely across space and time, from ancient spells of bewitchment to the "confessions" of celebrities in magazines. Their arguments have a meditative quality, challenging, and helpfully open-ended

Lewis Jones, Newsweek Europe

Coetzee’s writing is characteristically spare and penetrating… Kurtz proves both a lucid expositor and an evocative literary stylist, bringing psychoanalytic ideas and practices to life with rare precision and immediacy

Josh Cohen, Literary Review

[Arabella Kurtz] writes with wonderful eloquence about imagination and the self, parrying Coetzee's relentless unmasking with her gently intelligent demurral

Tessa Hadley, Guardian

Coetzee is an exceptionally clear thinker, and his gift for expressing complex concepts through considered, precise prose is impressive

Totally Dublin