Catharsis may be defined as “the first full realization and expression of emotions surrounding significant occurrences in one’s past; emotional release.” (Psych Central entry by Renée Grinnell.)

On his blog Screenwriting from Iowa, Scott W. Smith includes this interesting quote on the topic:

“Robert McKee, in his excellent book Story, defines the goal of the screenwriter as ‘a good story well told.’ A story must also be the vehicle for an emotion. The audience wants to be moved. Those elements that contribute to an emotional experience are valuable: those that aren’t are extraneous and probably dispensable.

“According to Aristotle, ‘catharsis’ (emotional and spiritual cleaning) is the goal of tragic drama and is produced by the strong emotion of ‘pity and terror.’ But why do we need cleaning, and what impurities—and why do we need such extreme emotion to burn them away?

“To ask this is to ask why we like to tell and hear stories at all. Perhaps, we need to be cleansed of the aimless chaos of our lives. The characters and actions of real life are raw, in unorganized state; Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) wrote, ‘The very impulse to write springs from an inner chaos crying for order, for meaning…’”

[From his post Artistotle, Catharsis & Extreme Emotion. (sic)]

The quote is from the book Screenplay: Writing the Picture, by Robin U. Russin, William M. Downs.

Related book: Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee.

As a fan of Diablo Cody – her imagination, theatrical verve and appearance, and screenwriting talents (“Juno,” “Jennifer’s Body” and the TV series “United States of Tara”) – I was interested to read a recent newspaper article about her new movie “Young Adult” – directed by Jason Reitman, and starring Charlize Theron.

In their article Going for the visceral in ‘Young Adult’ (Los Angeles Times, December 4, 2011), Nicole Sperling and John Horn note that Cody began developing “Young Adult” two years ago, about “an unlikable protagonist who, while writing the last chapter of her young adult series, spends hours watching reality TV and eavesdropping on the conversations of teenagers. She pulls at her beautiful blond tresses, constantly has a scowl on her face and has a penchant for treating others dismally.”

Cody said, “Mavis is a projection of my worse self. I’m a woman in my 30s who writes about teenagers, who has been accused of being immature and emotionally stunted. And I’m guilty of some compulsive, vindictive behaviors. I saw myself in her, but I thought, ‘What’s the worst possible version of that?’ It was really cathartic to write that character and to channel bad qualities into someone who had no filter.”

Her script features an eight-minute intro scene with little dialogue, and Cody also wrote many very specific stage directions for the movie — the kind of dog Mavis (Charlize Theron) owns, the type of car she drives, her behavior such as sending fake texts from her phone.

Cody said, “I remember writing those little things into the script and feeling like this is great because I’ve been pigeonholed as somebody who only writes a certain kind of dialogue. To do all these things that require no dialogue is freeing for me.”

In an earlier interview, she declared, “Everything I write is an emotional catharsis. It’s my way of exorcising demons. With Juno, people think the pregnancy being the major plot point. But for me it was the chance to work out some issues about a relationship I had in high school with a guy. The movie is a ninety-minute apology to this guy—so it does feel good.”

From Marie Claire interview by James Mottran, quoted in blog post “Emotional Catharsis”—Diablo Cody, by Scott W. Smith.

Cody was famously a stripper in her past, and said of the experience: “Stripping toughened my hide, but exposing myself as a writer has been a lot more brutal.” (imdb.com)

In my earlier post Diablo Cody on Developing Creativity and Writing Honestly, I include a quote from her blog about the value of being candid and revealing:

“The stuff that polite folks confine to the pages of padlocked journals, I’ve treated as a matter of open discussion. … When you possess the courage — or blunt, gourd-smacking stupidity — to be totally candid, you silently amass thousands of allies.”

All this relates to being willing to explore and perhaps reveal parts of our hidden, shadow sides in creative work. That is one of the topics I have been interested in for many years, collecting quotes and articles etc. – see my page: The Shadow Self.

Also see more quotes from writers on writing on my site The Inner Writer.

~ ~

We believe in the goodness of people. We believe in the power of the internet. We believe that Maya Angelou was absolutely right when she said “when you know better you do better.”

We need your help. We need your support. Learn more. Spread the word. Post our badge on your sites to show that you LINK with love.

From LINKwithlove.org by artist Kal Barteski – I learned about her site from the post by Brené Brown, PhD: Link With Love.

As a writer in the middle of my first novel, I experience swings from enchantment to disgust with my work.

Falling in love with your writing can be as inspiring, and as delusional, as falling in love with a person,.

These shifting perceptions aren’t just exclusive to writers.

In his post The Psychology of Creativity – Part VI: Curing Writer’s Block, David Sheppard writes about “author’s glow.” Here is an excerpt:

In her book The Writing Life, Annie Dillard puts the author’s feelings toward her own work in perspective:

“Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality.

“The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.”

A little later in the same work she says again:

“This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else.”

Authors fall in love with their work. A friend of mine has termed this the “author’s glow.” The author’s love for his own work can lead to a critical misjudging of it.

Inspiration sweeps over us like an ocean wave, but all that gets to the page is little bits of life’s debris like sifted sand.

We have to learn to express inspiration in words that trigger a similar emotional experience in the reader. This is the novelsmith’s burden.

David Sheppard is author of Novelsmithing: The Structural Foundation Of Plot, Character, And Narration.

Photo: Explored! #1 by Stephen Poff

Related site: The Inner Writer

“And, what better way to care for your heart than to give yourself more tools to deal with those inevitable times during the writer’s life that get you down.”

From her post The Writer’s Life – Depression & Creativity – which includes a number of Ideas For Dealing With Depression & Our Creativity – even several links to my own posts. Thanks.

Here are a couple of related posts on The Inner Writer :

Amy Tan on Writing and Depression, and Using What is Beyond Our Ordinary Senses

J.K. Rowling on Writing and Depression

creativity and depression, writing and depression, artists and depression, psychology of creativity, creative mind

The film Poppy Shakespeare, based on Clare Allen’s novel, takes us down a cinematic rabbit hole into north London’s fictional Dorothy Fish day hospital where the clearly ‘sane’ Poppy, played by Naomi Harris, has been mysteriously committed to a compulsory day-program for the mentally ill.

In a psychiatric Catch 22, she must prove herself insane in order to be eligible for the government funding (‘madness money’) she needs to pay a lawyer to prove in court that she is not insane.

Reminiscent of the Marshalsea in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, where debtors are imprisoned while their more guilty creditors walk free, the film’s hospital is a satire of an ineffectual mental health system, and a personal tribute to the patients Clare Allan came to know.

In the following excerpts from a Mail Online interview, Clare Allan tells how she ‘wrote’ herself out of an asylum.

“Now she thinks she’s an author!”

She broke down in her 20s and spent a decade bobbing in and out of the mental health system, her head only just above water.

Her psychiatrists thought her writing was proof of delusional tendencies (“Now she thinks she’s an author!”), and it took the encouragement of an astute social worker to propel her out of hospital and on to the 2007 bestseller lists with her first novel, Poppy Shakespeare – a black comedy set in the psychiatric ward of a day hospital, which has been likened to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Questioning ‘mental illness’

“What I’ve learnt from being in the system is that there’s a seed of mental illness in everyone,” says Clare, 39…”It made me question this divide between mental health and mental illness. Actually, I think there’s just a scale and you’re somewhere on it…

An elusive sense of self

“I’d never had a strong sense of self. My father died six months ago and, while sorting through his stuff, I found a story I wrote when I was really young, about a horse which went everywhere looking for a field to live in.

“It seemed significant because that’s something I still struggle with. Even now, I kind of feel, well, do I exist?”

Drugs and neglect

The NHS [Britain's National Health Service] offered her little hope of recovery. She is scathing about the lack of therapy offered, and dubious about the increasing doses of drugs she was prescribed by psychiatrists who barely knew her.

Clare herself felt written off, written out of her own narrative, perhaps, especially in light of the professionals’ scornful reaction to her writing ambitions.

“I began to see a future”

Her social worker, Bernadette, to whom she has dedicated Poppy Shakespeare, was the only one of them to provide the encouragement that shored her up. She recognised Clare’s very real talents. “And I began to see a future,” says Clare.

In 1999, buoyed by the confidence that Bernadette had instilled in her, Clare applied for and was accepted on to an MA course in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, a brave new world where the people she met trailed self-confidence.

“That was a shock,” she adds, dryly.

Writing on the ward

There were ups and downs, none more so than when she sold Poppy Shakespeare to Bloomsbury, though she doesn’t know why good luck precipitated a major setback. “I was in hospital for five months after that. I edited large sections of the book on the ward.”

She thinks she is “more integrated, a much more solid person” today, and her assessment seems justified.

She has certainly taken the screening of the TV film in her stride. “I’m fascinated to see it, but it’s not my baby.”

She even took a bit part as one of the doctors. “I had to wrestle Anna Maxwell Martin to the ground. For 50 takes.”

She believes the great divide lies not between sanity and insanity, but functioning and not functioning, between those who can hack it in the modern world and those who, temporarily or permanently, cannot.

A writers life

Living alone, she has learnt how to shepherd herself through. She takes a mood-stabilising drug and sees her social worker regularly. She writes fiction for a maximum of five hours a day – she also has a column in The Guardian and is finishing the first draft of her next book.

“I’m well, but I certainly don’t rule out that I might be in hospital again,” she says. “However, I think it very unlikely that my life would stop in the same way. I have an existence now.” She has a staffordshire bull terrier puppy – a focus outside herself and a bounding conduit to enjoying the outside world. She has reconnected with some of the old friends from Durham who fell away when she failed to return their calls, has maintained some from UEA and others from the wards.

She says her parents helped her practically throughout, “but I didn’t involve them in an emotionally close way. I felt I needed that separateness and independence.”‘

Relationships

She has never had a serious relationship.

“Open to offers!” she quips. And with similar facetiousness, she quotes Alan Bennett on her sexual preference, “That’s like asking a man dying of thirst whether he’d prefer Badoit or Perrier.”

But somehow that sounds wistful, giving the impression that her personal history might deter potential partners.

“It’s hard to know, isn’t it? I haven’t really given people the opportunity to decide.

“I give out very clear signals of not wanting to go there. Relationships are a problematic area for me. I can’t deny it. I’ve just got to learn.”

She once said she wanted a child.

“Did I?” She sounds amazed.

“If I had two lives, I’d want a child in one. But I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want a child on my own.

“A lot of the pleasure would be sharing the experience with someone else.

“So as I’ve got one life, I’ll take whatever happens. I’d love to meet the right person, for sure, but I’m quite happy on my own, too.”

Reality and fiction

She says she doesn’t want to be defined by her mental illness, and anticipates a future in which it is no longer the prime focus of her interviews.

Her next book concerns a journalist who fabricates a story, is sacked, and then sets about trying to prove that what he invented was true.

“You know, every book I’ve written (including two that are unpublished) is to do with reality and what happens when you mess around with it.

“I think that when people lie they often reveal more than when they tell the truth. Reality is really quite boring,” Clare Allan adds with a slightly shamefaced guffaw.

~~

Related:
Nurturing mental health: writing
mental health and creative talent
J.K. Rowling on Writing and Depression

~~

Clare Allen, writers inner life, mental illness and creativity, healing and art

“Because that’s where the energy is. That’s where the alive, fresh vision is, before society, which we’ve internalized, takes over and teaches us to be polite and censor ourselves.”  Natalie Goldberg

Read more and listen to audio clip on The Inner Writer

Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — shapes us. Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — gives us place, lineage, history, a sense of self.

Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — breaks us into pieces, shatters our understanding and gives it back over and over again, the story different every time.

Story — the abundance of it, and the lack of it — connects us with the world and outlines our relationship with everything.

When the power of story comes into the room, an alchemical reaction occurs that is unique to our kind: love or hate, identification or isolation, war or peace, good or evil intent can be stirred in us by words alone.

The power of story is understood by the powerful, yet the power of story belongs to all of us, especially the least powerful. History is what scholars and conquerors say happened; story is what it was like to live on the ground.

~ ~

Dusk, and the room glows only in candlelight for no one has wanted to move toward the lamps. Though twilight sits at our shoulders, we do not want to disturb the delicate attentiveness that hangs suspended between us.

There is a palpable sense of compassion and respect in the room. Eyes glisten with tears and laughter. This is story space. This is what happens when people set aside everything else and listen to each other with such quality of attention that speaking and listening become like meditation. Our whole way of being with one another subtly shifts: we become the ear in the heart.

~ ~

There are two modalities of storycatching explored in this book: oral tradition and personal writing. In the modern world, both speaking and writing are vital components in reclaiming and preserving story.

Both oral and written tradition is experiencing a renaissance in the modern world. Though we are under incredible pressure to fill our time with chores and distractions, to just keep moving in the race of our days, and to fall exhausted into bed, story remains our companion.

People keep claiming the value of personal stories… Story is loose in the world and the people of the world are communicating as never before.

Excerpts from Storycatcher: Making Sense of Our Lives through the Power and Practice of Story, by Christina Baldwin, from storycatcher.net — “share your own story with the Storycatcher network.”

Related:
The Inner Writer
Myth & story
Nurturing mental health : writing
~~

writing book, learning writing, myth and story, use myths for personal growth

“Artists need to be outsiders in order to really view what’s going on. That little bit of detachment has been great for me… As artists, we have to be brave. If we aren’t brave, we aren’t artists.” Writer, Producer, Director Paul Haggis [imdb.com]

Haggis is speaking from the perspective of a creatively accomplished adult. [His films include In the Valley of Elah; Letters from Iwo Jima; Casino Royale; Million Dollar Baby; Crash.]

But the experience of being a misfit, mutant or any number of other names for outsider, can be distressing or downright painful, especially as a teen – but also at any age if you have not yet found a path to express your talents, or don’t connect with others as much as you want.

Jane Austen wrote in Mansfield Park (1814) about one of her characters: “Everybody around her was gay and busy, prosperous and important; each had their object of interest, their part, their dress, their favourite scene, their friends and confederates: all were finding employment in consultations and comparisons, or diversion in the playful conceits they suggested.

“She alone was sad and insignificant; she had no share in anything; she might go or stay; she might be in the midst of their noise, or retreat from it to the solitude of the East Room, without being seen or missed.”

[Photo from the 1999 movie by Patricia Rozema.]

Dominican-American author and MIT professor Junot Diaz [The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao] commented in an interview about being an outsider as a child: “I can’t imagine anybody who ends up being an artist who didn’t pass through a time of geekiness. I was, as a kid, really obsessed with reading. In the neighborhood I grew up in, that was about as geeky as you could possibly get. … I think that the intellectual life is amazingly lonely in a country like ours.”

He notes his main character Oscar has interests that “guaranteed him an enormous amount of isolation, being interested in science-fiction, being interested in fantasy… But I think that probably what is more problematic was that he was a kid who couldn’t find it in him to pretend to be something he wasn’t. And that was something I always kind of admired about Oscar as protagonist.

“I knew that I couldn’t myself personally risk the censure and the ostracization to be so honest to myself… anyone who has ever been a kid knows how deep loneliness can go. Part of where I get the writing from is being honest about what childhood was like.” [From Bostonist Interview bostonist.com]

Writer Anne Rice admits she was “a bad student, I daydreamed in class, wrote stories in my notebooks. I learned the basics, but most of my active intellectual life was outside of school. It was acutely painful because [my sister and I] felt different, like misfits. Our individuality was almost irrepressible, but I wanted to fit in.”

Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, PhD [author of The Gifted Adult] notes in her article Encountering the Gifted Self Again, For the First Time that “Contrary to stereotyped beliefs, large numbers of gifted adults are charismatic, popular, socially adept people who are known as extraordinary leaders and valued friends.

“However, many also share a history of chronic feelings of loneliness… Yet many gifted adults are not popular, have few friends, and struggle to gain a sense of belonging.”

Screenwriter Anne Meredith (Bastard Out of Carolina; Cavedweller etc) commented in our interview about the value for her: “My sense of being an outsider got worse and worse through my adolescence. Or better and better. It helps me work in Hollywood, because I’m not intimidated by anybody, and it helps because I have a kind of innocent way of looking at things.”

Some related posts:
Being an outsider can be a building block of excellence
Conforming sucks
Nurturing creativity in solitude
Einstein and other non-conformists

“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.

“And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it.

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open… You have to keep yourself open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.”

Like many teachers and personal growth leaders, she emphasizes the key role of self-awareness. Living our lives fully and creatively means being aware – as much as we can – of the truth of our inner lives and life stories, without judging or condemning.

Wanting to leave behind shameful or stupid or hurtful aspects of our experience may be ‘natural’ – but that sort of protective reaction may not really be in the best interest of achieving our full growth, and making the most of our abilities.

Writer Catherine Robson comments:

The things we are ashamed of, the dark scars that cover our wounds
and our crude attempts to heal with substance and isms, that holy hell
hole is our gift. Not maybe, not just for some people.

It simply is.

That doesn’t mean the abusers and users are off the hook. But that’s
not our business. Your only and essential job is to choose, not just
to accept, but to powerfully and willingly choose, the parents, the past
and the personality you have been given.

It takes just a moment, a flutter of an eyelid. But it’s the difference
between loss and life. The difference between a victim and a writer.

[From the page Nurturing mental health: writing 2 - which includes books on writing and rewriting your life story.]

This image is from the book Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction, by Laurie Vickroy – which “explores how contemporary fiction narratives represent trauma, and investigates novels by Toni Morrison, Marguerite Duras, Jamaica Kincaid, Larry Heinemann, Pat Barker, and Dorothy Allison, among others.”

Andrew Schneider in his article Overcoming Fear and Healing Wounds notes, “We cannot escape childhood without being wounded. Every time we made demands of others and they refused us, we were diminished in our self-worth.

“Each time we asked for love and it was withheld, our self-value decreased. Whenever we attempted to prove ourselves and we failed, we lost some of our power.

“As we repeated these experiences, patterns of inadequacy developed, and fears of various kinds took root in our subconscious. Then as we grew up and became more self-sufficient we worked hard at overcoming our diminished self-worth, our decreased self-value, and our loss of power.

“But we have not been totally successful. The reason is that underlying all our efforts are the fears buried in our subconscious. What is unknown within us usually controls us.”

Holly Black, author of The Spiderwick Chronicles, says, “A traumatic childhood is the gift that keeps giving to a writer.” [Parade, Aug 12 2007]

In her review of the new memoir Circling My Mother by Mary Gordon, Donna Seaman declares, “Family trauma is often at the root of compelling literature. Children under duress frequently find solace in books, and young writers-in-the-making soon learn that channeling feelings and thoughts onto the page or screen staves off anguish, however briefly.”

She notes that Gordon “has fictionalized many of the lies, betrayals and sacrifices that poisoned her family circle in her provocative short stories and intrepid novels. But because she also needed to address head-on the hard facts about her past, she began writing memoirs.” [Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2007]

We can, of course, always learn more about our inner subconscious depths, and make creative use of both “positive” and traumatic or “negative” aspects of our histories.

A TIME magazine article: “Use a Happy Memory as a Guide” [a section of the main article "20 Ways to Get and Stay Happy"] advises, “Learn to scan your memory bank for your strengths, talents, passions, interests, practical coping skills, and earlier potential — whether it’s actualized or not.

“Scanning this memory bank and gleaning material that can be used to reinvent yourself to be happier is key, says Barbara Becker-Holstein, psychologist and author of Enchanted Self: A Positive Therapy.”

In her article Remembering the Best, Restoring Yourself, Rapture, Dr. Holstein notes that most of us “have sustained loss and experienced pain… Sometimes we’ve been stepped upon, left or forgotten. If we spend our daily life focusing on these disappointments then we cannot release the positive energies we need to make the most of the present moment and to plan for the future. …

“Besides, there is beauty in our own story and most, if not all disappointments we’ve experienced have strengthened us. Often, we have even developed talents in coping with hard times that can reemerge in ways to enhance pleasure and/or help us be of service to the world.”

Our lives are not “a series of facts only,” David J. Pollay reminds us in his article What’s Your Story?! Make it a Good One. “It is mostly a set of interpretations we have made about events in our life,” he writes. “These interpretations add up to a story – a story of who we think we are, what we have experienced, and what we’re likely to do in the future.”

Pollay quotes Dan McAdams, professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, from his book The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, “If you feel that your myth is stagnant, if you sense that you are not moving forward in life with purpose, if you believe that you are falling behind in some sense with respect to the growth of your personal identity, then what you are looking for is developmental change in personal myth.”

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Books: writing the memoir / journaling
Early life
Myth & story

Rowling (her name rhymes with bowling, rather than howling) replied, “I feel very strongly that there is a move to sanitize literature because we’re trying to protect children not from, necessarily, from the grizzly facts of life, but from their own imaginations.

“I remember being in America a few years ago and Halloween was approaching, and three television programmes in a row were talking about how to explain to children it wasn’t real.

“Now there’s a reason why we create these stories, and we have always created these stories, and the reason why we have had these pagan festivals, and the reason why even the church allows a certain amount of fear… we need to feel fear, and we need to confront that in an controlled environment. That’s a very important part of growing up, I think.”

Rowling adds, “What are we saying to children who do have scary and disturbing thoughts? We’re saying that’s wrong, that’s not natural, and it’s not something that’s intrinsic to the human condition. That they’re in some way odd or ill… That’s a very dangerous thing to tell a child.”

[Photo: Rowling at work in one of her favorite cafes.]

Our shadow self can be a source of rich imagination and creative energy. And how we respond to those aspects of ourselves, and to the “disturbing” or frightening thoughts we have throughout life, impacts our emotional health in many ways.

Clinical psychologist Robert Maurer finds that one of the key ingredients in the creative process is fear, and how we deal with our fears. [See article Writers can use fear to advantage.]

In his article Harry Potter and the Power of the Positive, Dave Shearon notes that in the stories not only do the children face fearful experiences, but find powers within themselves to prevail.

Shearon writes, “Although Harry does not seem to have the type of magical power that would enable him to face the evil wizard, he has already survived several confrontations. Professor Dumbledore has repeatedly claimed that Harry has a magic greater than his opponent’s, and one which his opponent underestimates: the magic of love.

“Sappy? Absolutely. These days, however, I am convinced that ‘sappy’ and ‘soft-hearted’ are not particularly strong arguments against a proposition. Chris Peterson reports that the character strength that distinguishes the best leaders at West Point is the capacity to love and be loved.”

As Shearon notes, “positive psychology is not just about avoiding bad things. Research evidence also continues to mount that a general approach to life based on a frequent experience of positive emotions and habitually positive thought patterns actually increases the likelihood of good consequences.”

The books also confront other primal experiences in human life, such as dying. J.K. Rowling was deeply affected by the death of her mother from multiple sclerosis in 1990.

“My mum died six months into writing (the books), and I think that set the central theme — this boy dealing with loss,” Rowling says.

“I think children are very scared of this stuff even if they haven’t experienced it, and I think the way to meet that is head-on,” she says. “I absolutely believe, as a writer and as a parent, that the solution is not to pretend things don’t happen but to examine them in a loving, safe way.” [Assoc. Press 7.19.07]

In her review of the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Mary McNamara writes, “Unlike the predecessors to whom she is invariably compared, Rowling is neither illuminating Christian myth (C.S. Lewis) nor confronting a post-trench-warfare world of industrial corruption (J.R.R. Tolkien). Instead she is sharing a more populist message: The real quest in life is that of personal transformation, and not even the Chosen One can go it alone.

“Throughout the series, the three main child characters — Harry, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley — have changed before our very eyes as Rowling deftly captured both the natural maturation process of each and the effect shared experiences have on friendships. In this final book, they, and most of their friends and enemies, learn precisely what they are each capable of.” [From Harry Potter comes to a magical end, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2007]

More :
Positive psychology articles & sites
Positive psychology books
Positive psychology bookmarks