Routledge Couch Tales: Short Stories

A psychoanalyst sits in his consulting room waiting for the next patient. Thoughts, feelings and anxieties about his own current life begin to assault him. Partly as a way of dealing with the crisis in his own life, he begins to write fictional stories loosely based upon his patients' stories. Between each story the analyst produces a journal which comments upon the stories as well as his own developing personal situation. Couch Tales is a work of pure fiction, for the psychoanalyst and the patients are imaginary. However, they also reflect Roger Kennedy's work as a psychoanalyst, and the way that psychoanalysis reflects in depth on peoples' lives and narratives. Review "Roger Kennedy has imagined a psychoanalyst who works through his self-questioning by imagining patients about whom he writes short stories. Being himself an experienced psychoanalyst, Kennedy creates an ingenious tension between the book, the fictional analyst's private journal and the touching stories of these doubly fictional patients."--Dr Michael Parsons, Distinguished Supervising and Training Analyst "Wherever Kennedy has put himself into writing--being a subject, knowing a history--he has always done so from an astonishingly fresh perspective. In these deeply moving short stories he turns to fiction in order to represent himself (and analysts) from the same kind of winsome perspective he has used before...as a device. For make no mistake about it, Kennedy is not only of serious mind, and wonderfully devious delivery, he is also a brilliant writer. Try to put this book down once begun. I dare you!"--Christopher Bolas About the Author Roger Kennedy