therapeutic fiction genre

• fictions are mental constructs, fantasies by means of which we fashion or “fiction” (fingere) a life or a person into a case history

• Portnoy's Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth

• therapy is the theme on which the narrative incidents are hung together ... provides the means for focusing and selecting incidents, like a political novel choosing politically relevant events. And usually, the end of the story leads out of therapy into cure and world

• Although the listener shapes the tale into the therapeutic genre, the condition of the teller – that which makes him a hospital patient – plays a large part in the form of the tale, especially its stylistics.

• healthy and unhealthy work of art