Great minds think alike, the nine zillionth example:
Virginia Woolf, from To the Lighthouse:
"She felt…how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
[painting of Woolf by her sister, Vanessa Bell]
Carl Jung, from Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Chapter IV, Psychiatric Activies:
In many cases in psychiatry, the patient who comes to us has a story that is not told, and which as a rule no one knows of. To my mind, therapy only really begins after the investigation of that wholly personal story. It is the patient's secret, the rock against which he is shattered. If I know his secret story, I have a key to the treatment. The doctor's task is to find out how to gain that knowledge. In most cases exploration of the consicous material is insufficient. Sometimes an association test can open the way; so can the interpretation of dreams, or long and patient human contact with the individual. In therapy the problem is always the whole person, never the symptom alone. We must ask questions which challenge the whole personality.
As must the dramatist, surely — I wonder if this is the half-secret connection between drama and therapy, the challenging of character.
Kit Stolz 