ABSTRACT
According to Goethe, 'there can be but 36 tragic situations', although later Foster-Harris narrowed this down to three basic literary plots. This chapter shows the basic underlying emotional structure in which personal or interpersonal tension, conflict, quest, developmental challenge or problem is stated and then, through the action, modified in some way to an ending, whether happy, tragic or inconclusive arguably in novel. In therapy there is, at least in the minds of patient and therapist a sense of movement from presentation of a symptom, its explication and understanding, to attempts at resolution, accommodation or modification. One of the central characters in the Peruvian Nobel laureate Garcia Llosa's 'magical realist' masterpiece, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a psychiatrist. In true tongue-in-cheek post-modern style the novel contains a number of 'stories within a story', one of which depicts a fictional psychoanalytic therapy. The chapter finds essential ingredients of good therapy: attachment and affect regulation; meaning making; and change promotion.
