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This is a fascinating and unusual book, which debates the moral status of literature, psychotherapy and the individual’s ethical position within their historical milieu. It presents a series of e-mail exchanges between a psychotherapist and a writer. Arabella Kurtz is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Consultant Clinical Psychologist, working and teaching in mental health in England. J.M. Coetzee is a Nobel and Booker Prize winning novelist. Both are deeply steeped in Western literature and myth – Dostoyevsky, Sebald, classical Greek mythology, Hawthorne, Freud – which stimulates and illustrates their exchange. Kurtz also introduces her correspondent to psychoanalytic ideas in the tradition of Klein and Winnicott, as well as the theories of groups and social systems from Menzies Lyth and Bion. Each chapter is headed by a summary of the issues under debate. I particularly enjoyed the glossary of psychoanalytic concepts which Kurtz provides, in which important terms are beautifully rendered into accessible common language.
Coetzee is interested in the relationship between storytelling and concepts of telling ‘the truth’. Early on he asks ‘do we trust the human imagination as an invariable force for good?’ (p. 15) and later ‘about every story we can legitimately ask cui bono’ (p. 60). For Kurtz, what is at stake in fictions of the self is how psychic mechanisms, such as repression and the repetition compulsion, prevent an individual from accepting ‘the invitation to inhabit one’s perspective – to understand and own it for all its difficulty and its complexity in as mindful a way as possible’ (p. 17). She counters Coetzee’s image of a human drive towards deliberate self-deception with accounts of uncovering unconscious communication through free association, play, symbolisation and group reflection in clinical work. With great subtlety she shows how psychoanalysis’ concept of unconscious processes unsettles ideas of intentionality and culpability. As Menzies Lyth comm