The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

J.M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life & Times of Michael K, Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace, Summertime, and The Childhood of Jesus. He was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice.
 
Arabella Kurtz is a consultant clinical psychologist and is completing psychoanalytic psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic in London. She has held various posts in the National Health Service adult and forensic mental health services and is currently a senior clinical tutor in the University of Leicester clinical psychology training course. Kurtz lives in England.

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ONE

Being author of one’s life-story (inventing one’s past) versus being merely its narrator. Producing a well-shaped story versus telling the true story.

The analyst as the story’s ideally attentive listener. Hearing and analysing resistances in the narrative. The therapeutic goal: freeing the patient’s voice, the patient’s narrative imagination.

JMC – What are the qualities of a good (a plausible, even a compelling) story? When I tell other people the story of my life – and more importantly when I tell myself the story of my life – should I try to make it into a well-formed artefact, passing swiftly over the times when nothing happened, heightening the drama of the times when lots was happening, giving the narrative a shape, creating anticipation and suspense; or on the contrary should I be neutral, objective, striving to tell a kind of truth that would meet the criteria of the courtroom: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

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? Above all, given the wealth of material I hold in memory, the material of a lifetime, what should or must I leave out, bearing in mind Freud’s warning that what I omit without thinking (i.e. without conscious thought) may be the key to the deepest truth about me? Yet how is it logically possible for me to know what I am unthinkingly leaving out?

AK – I suppose it is the task of psychoanalysis to try to tell the deepest truth; or more modestly and more accurately, to analyse resistances to its telling so that an individual’s story can emerge in as full and coherent and engaged a way as possible at any one point – because the process is continuous, the story ever-changing. The true story one might tell as a child will be different from the story one might tell about the same experiences as an adolescent, or an adult, and so on.

Freud proposed the method of free association as the best way of getting access to unconscious experience in the consulting room, but in my experience it really doesn’t work in the way people expect. The patient is invited to speak as freely as they are able, without reference to normal social rules and niceties, but what he or she usually discovers is the extent to which free expression is constrained – even in the privacy of their own minds. What this does is allow us to see the way that defences operate for the individual and to work on the analysis of resistance, which is a substantial task in most therapies.

One way of thinking about psychoanalysis is to say that it is aimed at setting free the narrative or autobiographical imagination. If we follow this line, then it is possible that a writer like yourself may have insights to offer on the form that narrative takes in the consulting room.

JMC – Very well. Then let me ask a question that has nagged at me for some time. What is it that impels you, as a therapist, to want your patient to confront the truth about themself, as opposed to collaborating or colluding in a story – let us call it a fiction, but an empowering fiction – that would make the patient feel good about themself, good enough to go out into the world better able to love and work?

A more radical way of posing the same question is: Are all autobiographies, all life-narratives, not fictions, at least in the sense that they are constructions (fiction from Latin fingere, to shape or mould or form)? The claim here is not that autobiog-raphy is free, in the sense that we can make up our life-story as we wish. Rather, the claim is that in making up our autobiography we exercise the same freedom that we have in dreams, where we impose a narrative form that is our own, even if influenced by forces that are obscure to us, on elements of a remembered reality.

As we are both aware, there are varieties of self-help therapy that pretty clearly see their goal as making the subject feel good about themself, and that tend to be dismissive of the criterion of truth if the truth is too much to handle. We tend to look down on such therapies. We say that the cure they produce is only a seeming cure, that sooner or later the subject will again crash against reality. Yet what if, by some kind of social consensus, we agreed not to rock the boat but on the contrary to come together to affirm one another’s fantasies, as happens in some therapeutic groups? Then there would be no reality to crash against.

In our liberal, post-religious culture we tend to think of the narrative imagination as a benign force within us. But there is another way of seeing it, based on our experience of how self-narratives work in many people’s lives: as a faculty we use to elaborate for ourselves and our circle the story that suits us best, a story that justifies the way we have behaved in the past and behave in the present, a story in which we are generally right and other people are generally wrong. When this self-narrative clashes blatantly with reality, with the way things really are, we as observers conclude that the subject is deluded, that the truth-for-the-self produced by the subject’s imagination is in conflict with the real truth. Therefore is it not one of the duties of the therapist to bring it home to the patient that they are not free to make up their life-story, that making up stories about ourselves can have serious real-world consequences?

AK – But a narrative about one’s life that is too self-serving in the way you describe will have a frailty, a brittleness, a tendency to come undone on its own terms. One could describe the activity of psychoanalysis as a combination of attentive listening and selective comment – on those aspects of a life-story which do not seem to hold, or which seem to hint at the possibility that a more convincing underlying story may emerge. This is what I meant when I said that I think of psychoanalysis as aimed at freeing the narrative imagination.

I want to ask you as a writer whether this idea, that of working through mask-narratives to find a truer one, resonates? I mean truer in the sense of poetic or emotional truth, when a thing is both true to itself, internally coherent, and in correspondence with things outside, but not necessarily in a way that is transparent or direct. And what writers know, and psychotherapists can learn from them I believe, is that the best way of trying to get to something both true and new, or newly conscious, is often a creative one; or at least at odds with what is established and laid down as true in an unexamined way in our communal, shared reality.

I do believe that the better psychotherapists, like the better and more sympathetic listeners, attend more to the internal coherence of a narrative – the unspoken desires and frustrations, which emerge gradually in inconsistencies and disruptions of form and content – and impose less of themselves in terms of external ideas about the reality of a situation or preconceived notions of how a life ought to be lived.

TWO

Writers and their problematic (perhaps self-serving) notions of the truth. The malleability of memory. Fixing memories versus raiding the memory-store to rewrite the life-story. The allure of self-invention. Social consequences of free self-invention.

The patient’s truth in the therapeutic encounter. Dynamic (evolving) truth. The mediating role of the therapist. Intersubjective truth. Sympathy. The role of the heart, the role of the mind. Shared social experience as constraint on reckless self-invention. The lessons of art....