There's nothing like a good book to help you through a bad time.
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from a 9jun15 New Yorker article by Ceridwen Dovey titled "Can Reading Make You Happier?"
After reading a list of books on death, spirituality, and the afterlife prescribed by a bibliotherapist at the London School of Life, the author made use of insights gleaned from this exercise to help assuage the physical pain of an injury:
"The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is - but therein lies its power. In a secular age, 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. Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Virginia Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book 'splits us into two parts as we read,' for 'the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,' while promising 'perpetual union' with another mind.
Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The bibliotherapist in a 1916 Atlantic Monthly article titled 'A Literary Clinic', explains that, 'A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.' To a middle-aged client with 'opinions partially ossified', the following prescription is given: 'You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stunning, relentless novels.'
Ella Berthoud of London's School of Life and her fellow colleague Susan Elderkin, mostly practice 'affective' bibliotherapy, advocating the restorative power of reading fiction.
Regarding her work at the School of Life, Ella said, "Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a transformational experience."
Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a 'healing place for the soul'. The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions.
There is now a network of bibliotherapists selected and trained by Berthoud and Elderkin, and affiliated with the School of Life, working around the world from New York to Melbourne. The most common ailments people tend to bring to them are the life-juncture transitions, Berthoud says: being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your relationship, or suffering bereavement. The bibliotherapists see a lot of retirees, too, who know that they have twenty years of reading ahead of them but perhaps have only previously read crime thrillers and want to find something new to sustain them.
Berthoud and Elderkin are also the authors of 'The Novel Cure: An A-Z of Literary Remedies', which is written in the style of a medical dictionary and matches ailments with suggested reading cures. Published in eighteen countries, it allows additions to accommodate native writers and country-specific reading recommendations. The new adapted ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the adapted ailments is 'having too high an opinion of your own child'; in the Indian edition, 'public urination' and 'cricket, obsession with' are included; the Italians introduced 'impotence', 'fear of motorways', and 'desire to embalm'; and the Germans added 'hating the world' and 'hating parties'. Berthoud and Elderkn are now working on a children's-literature version, 'A Spoonful of Stories'.
For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading's effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of 'mirror neurons' - neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else - the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that when people read about an experience they display simulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we're reading stories and when we're trying to guess at another person's feelings.
Other studies show something similar - that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others. And in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction [rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction] improved participants' results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to 'theory of mind': the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.
From Marcel Proust's 'On Reading': 'With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends - books - it's because we really want to.'
George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that 'art is 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.'
Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. 'Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,' the author Jeanette Winterson has written. 'What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.'
To borrow from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, 'Come, and take choice of all my library, and so beguile thy sorrow.'
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I think books are like people, in the sense that they'll turn up in your life when you most need them. ~ Emma Thompson
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