The good story considered closely — Coetzee's involvement with psychoanalysis

In his e-mail exchange with the psychoanalytic psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz, Coetzee makes important statements about the relationship between his imagining of psychic processes and psychotherapy. The literary-philosophical background of these statements is examined in this article to show links with the imaginative processes in his fiction. Psychotherapeutic discourse is easily trapped within the limits of its specific genre in which the psychotherapeutic subject is « supposed-to-know ». This is a form of resistance against the living, moving stream of consciousness. Coetzee develops a range of narrative strategies and linguistic techniques in order to forestall this resistance and to bring the subject-as-a-process-of-becoming into movement. There is a strong resemblance with the aspects of construction and de-construction in the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis and a connection with the current psychoanalytical debate about the subject.