The fiction is the self-awareness

I have been a psychotherapist in Vienna for eighteen years and I want to be clear that none of my characters are based on any of my clients. The fiction draws on human patterns, which I know something about, and not on individual cases, which are privileged and remain so. What therapy teaches you is that self-knowledge is not the same as change, and that people can understand their own situation with total clarity and still be unable to act differently. This is the most interesting thing I know and it is what my fiction is about. My protagonist in the current manuscript knows exactly why she does what she does. She does it anyway. I find this endlessly compelling. I live in the fourth district, near the Karlskirche, and I write in the evenings after my last session, which ends at seven. Vienna has more therapists per capita than almost anywhere in Europe and also more written-about psyches, which may not be a coincidence. What I am trying to write against is the tradition in which psychological insight = resolution. The insight is the setup. What comes after is the actual story.