Prognosis literary
Bibliotherapy offers a novel approach
It changed my life: People occasionally say that after a book teaches them something crucial. Stephen Bonnycastle puts it this way: “A book enters the life of an individual, a deep relation is formed, and the person changes in some significant way.”
Bonnycastle is among the contributors to an anthology called What is “Bibliotherapy”? The answer is that bibliotherapy sets out to improve troubled lives by offering advice to individuals on how books can help them. It seizes on the wellknown ability of certain books to change us and turns that into a conscious effort to heal. In an informal way it expands the normally private drama of reading to include two people, therapist and client.
The word bibliotherapy was coined in a 1916 Atlantic Monthly article, “A Literary Clinic,” by Samuel Crothers, a Unitarian minister and popular essayist. Crothers describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by a man named Bagster, who dispensed reading recommendations to make sick people well. Bagster considered bibliotherapy a new science.
To a middle-aged client with crusty, calcified views, Bagster prescribed: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” Bagster was called away to deal with a patient who had overdosed on war literature, leaving Crothers to contemplate the books that put new life into us and “set the life pulse strong but slow.”
When I first heard about bibliotherapy I thought it was an amiable joke, like retail therapy for people whose mood improves when they shop. And in fact bibliotherapists sometimes notice a certain comic element in their work, neatly summarized in the title of a muchquoted and otherwise entirely serious 2004 article, “Read Two Books and Write Me in the Morning,” in the journal Teaching Exceptional Children. It’s about techniques for using books when “emotional intervention” is needed in a classroom.
It carries the byline of Kimberly Maich, an assistant professor in the Department of Teacher Education at Brock University in St. Catharines. Bibliotherapists often have academic specialties (cognition and learning in Maich’s case), but they are intent on exploring the curative power of books.
Many bibliotherapists in this country belong to the Canadian Applied Literature Association (CALA), which explores therapeutic applications of literature and stories, a successor to the Association of Bibliotherapy and Applied Literature (ABAL).
They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels
Some of them also belong to an international group, Bibliotherapy Round Table, which sponsors lectures and exchanges ideas.
Their work usually involves a therapist who prescribes books to be read, then discusses the results with the patient. Sometimes it’s an elementary-school teacher who recognizes that a child is having emotional trouble, perhaps because of a death in the family or the child’s own physical limitation. Bibliotherapists will find books that let children feel they are not alone with their problems. One enthusiastic description of the technique says bibliotherapy can help children cope with “teasing, name-calling, mockery, fears and sexuality changes.”
Many readers will decide they are better served by self-medicating. The great novelist George Eliot was far ahead of bibliotherapy in the 19th century. She considered fiction the nearest thing to life: “It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” In 1878, following the death of her life partner, George Henry Lewes, she overcame her grief at losing him through a program of reading.
But how does it work? A writer for the New Yorker, Ceridwen Dovey, reported on her own bibliotherapy in an article, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” Her therapist was Ella Berthoud, who works with Alain de Botton’s School of Life in London. Like many bibliotherapists, Berthoud sometimes does her work by email.
Dovey, while initially skeptical of the movement’s evangelism, found herself unexpectedly enjoying even the initial email questions about her emotional life and her reading habits. She confessed to worrying about her spiritual resources. She feared she wasn’t ready to handle tragedy, such as the inevitable future grief of losing someone she loved.
Berthoud recommended The Guide, by R. K. Narayan, about a man who works as a tour guide at a railway station in India and goes through many changes before finding his destiny as a spiritual guide. She thought Dovey could benefit from a number of fictions, including Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, and the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, a work of speculative fiction. She also suggested Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God.
Dovey worked through the list over a couple of years, finding it both engaging and helpful. Her ability to withstand grief remains fortunately untested but insights in those books helped her through a period of acute physical pain. She was left grateful to Berthoud and the chosen authors: “I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.”
The world of bibliotherapy contains many researchers, most of them academics, searching for ways to develop it into a more effective technique. A typical figure is Hoi F. Cheu, a professor in the English department at Laurentian University. A student of literature with a bent for unexpected themes (he wrote his PhD dissertation on Zen and the Art of James Joyce), he now concentrates on bibliotherapy. He works with several hospitals, including the Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto.
Cheu believes that recent explorations of neuroplasticity open new directions for bibliotherapy. He quotes Norman Doidge’s book, The Brain that Changes Itself, on “The Culturally Modified Brain.” As Cheu writes, “We now have scientific observations to demonstrate that cultural activities can change brain structures. After decades of cultural construction theories, we can now reunite with the scientists to investigate a biological approach to literature.”
That’s all for the future, a dream of truly ambitious practitioners. For now, bibliotherapy mainly hopes to help a reader experience catharsis by identifying with characters in key books, which will provide insight into individual problems. It seems likely that this is what millions of readers already experience without assistance.
Bibliotherapy’s modest goal is to help others find the same path.
fulford
Continued from Page B5
It is amplifying experience beyond the bounds of our personal lot