The Good Story
JM Coetzee, Arabella Kurtz
Harvill Secker
The Good Story is a series of exchanges between author JM Coetzee and clinical therapist Arabella Kurtz that explores how psychoanalysis understands our need to make stories, write memories and act in groups. Sigmund Freud once said that ‘psychoanalysis brings out the worst in everyone’, and the act of analysing psychoanalysis could easily sink even further into the mire. If psychotherapy doggedly examines the dark ‘repressed’ energies of the individual’s story and psyche, then thinking about what it means to think about what these mean (and so on) can be an exhausting, endlessly speculative and fairly charmless enterprise. It’s heavy stuff, and much of the book ends up in this territory.
Coetzee dominates the conversation. He sets the agenda for each chapter by framing (overly) detailed reflections as questions for Kurtz to respond to, and returns to a persistent set of concerns: the relative relationship between truth/fiction, the return of the repressed, and the role of disavowal in group and national narratives. Coetzee is an exceptionally clear thinker, and his gift for expressing complex concepts through considered, precise prose is impressive. There is important intellectual inquiry here, but the dialogue also rambles, repeats itself and takes for granted as many basic assumptions of depth psychology – that is, psychoanalytic therapy and research that takes into account the unconscious – as it questions.
And yet while it is peppered with literary, political, clinical and biographical case studies, in its finest moments this conversation moves far beyond interminable speculation. Coetzee and Kurtz are capable of challenging both classical psychoanalytic theory and its postmodern, existential variants. They seek sense-making strategies that can allow us to live both happily and skeptically; to own our stories while disowning their claim to truth. While the book is a testament to just how strongly depth psychology has infiltrated our cultural consciousness, in the end it shows psychoanalysis to be just one narrative in understanding the self’s fictions – one that is potentially useful, or at least aesthetically interesting when it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In the words of Kurtz, ‘It is a comic narrative, in fact, of the best sort.’ If inconclusive, then, at least this book’s psychoanalytic speculation makes for a good story by somebody’s standards.
Words: Gill Moore
Image: Anne Haeming
