Books have long been used – whether consciously or unconsciously – to bring solace and healing to readers. This can be traced back to the oldest known library in Thebes, Egypt which had engraved above it’s door “healing place of the soul”.
Literature helps us cope with the everyday pain of being human, existential doubts, navigate our inner worlds as well as the reality of our lives. In this way, it can be very similar to the therapeutic experience. Both communicate through stories and metaphor while searching for experience and meaning hidden underneath the words.
When we are the reader, we can either take the position of the therapist reading the text to understand the characters, find meaning in their stories and add to this; or we can become the patient looking to the author or characters to help us understand what it is to be human.
Freud – who believed the poets and philosophers discovered the unconscious – also saw the ways that literature could allow readers to experience emotions created by our greatest anxieties that we usually try to avoid. Unrequited love, betrayal, loss and death can all be explored safely within the pages of a book, picked up or put down whenever the reader decides.
Reading can open doorways into our inner worlds through our own engagement with the text or through talking about books with another.
If you are interested in exploring your relationship with reading, a bibliotherapy session is a good place to start. Perhaps you are going through a life transition, wanting to reclaim your reading identity or open more doorways in your mind through literature.
Before the session, you will be sent a questionnaire about your reading memories and habits, your life stage and what may be preoccupying you now. The hour-long session that follows will continue this conversation about your relationship with reading. Afterwards, you will be sent a personalised prescription of six books that will expand upon what is explored during the session.
This experience of a therapeutic conversation can also be an introduction into what could be further explored psychotherapeutically.
Here are some of the reasons why people may seek out bibliotherapy:
- A realisation that reading is part of their individual identity and this can be anchoring when going through a life transition, such as becoming a parent, moving cities, changing careers, going through a divorce, retiring
- Making sense of your own story
- Normalising life stages
- Accessing emotions that are hard to articulate
