ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the ways in which literature can help deepen reader's understanding of some common psychiatric conditions: anxiety, abnormal grief, dissociation and narcissism. These 'labels', or diagnoses, it should be emphasised, are seen merely as useful rubrics rather than fixed biological entities, which is not to say they do not have identifiable psychobiological correlates. Literature, and psychotherapy, although always concerned with individual lives and stories, nevertheless aspire to general truths about the human condition, occupying an intermediate zone between the uniqueness of the individual narrative, and the impersonality of universal scientific laws. Siegfried, the eponymous protagonist of the third part of Wagner's Ring Cycle, is a typical conduct-disordered male adolescent. Boorish, rebellious and demanding, lacking all tenderness or consideration, he relentlessly humiliates his crippled foster-father Mime in whose sole control he has been since infancy. Yet this exasperating boy, as the cycle proceeds, comes to achieve manhood and heroic stature.
