Rethinking Therapeutic Reading

Kelda Green

Description

A reconsideration of the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world.

‘Rethinking Therapeutic Reading’ uses a combination of literary criticism and experimental psychology to examine the ways in which literature can create therapeutic spaces for personal thinking. It reconsiders the role that serious literary reading might play in the real world, reclaiming literature as a vital tool for dealing with human troubles.

Introduction; Part One: Four Models; I. Senecan Tragedy and Stoic Philosophy; II. Therapy and the Essay: Montaigne, after Seneca; III. Therapy and Poetry: Wordsworth, after Seneca; IV. Therapy and the Novel: George Eliot, after Wordsworth; Part Two: Three Experiments; V. Experiment One: First Impressions; VI. Experiment Two: Slowing Down and Tuning In; VII. Experiment Three: Writing Back; Conclusion; Index.

Sujets

• Experimental psychology
• Literary criticism
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 09 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785273834
• Langue: English

Extrait

Rethinking Therapeutic Reading
Rethinking Therapeutic Reading
Lessons from Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot
Kelda Green
With a foreword by Professor Michael Wood
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Kelda Green 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020936291
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-381-0 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-381-7 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
Written with love for my parents
and with thanks to Professor Philip Davis
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Introduction
Part I Four Models
1. Senecan Tragedy and Stoic Philosophy
2. Therapy and the Essay: Montaigne, after Seneca
3. Therapy and Poetry: Wordsworth, after Seneca
4. Therapy and the Novel: George Eliot, after Wordsworth
Part II Three Experiments
5. Experiment One: A First Reading
6. Experiment Two: Slowing Down and Tuning In
7. Experiment Three: Writing Back
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
5.1 The three passages used in experiment one
5.2 Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract one
5.3 The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract one
5.4 Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract one
5.5 Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract two
5.6 The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract two
5.7 Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract two
5.8 Verbs used in the first person in response to the news article
5.9 Verbs used in the first person in response to the poetry extracts
7.1 The letters written by each participant in experiment three
Tables
5.1 Experiment one: Sample information
5.2 The order of direct quotations in participant A2’s response to poetry extract one
6.1 Experiment two: Sample information
7.1 Experiment three: Sample information
FOREWORD
‘All sorrows can be borne’, the writer Karen Blixen once said, ‘if you put them in a story, or tell a story about them’, and this belief is often thought to lie behind much of the work of psychoanalysis: not just a talking cure but a telling cure. You won’t be able to manage your need or distress or even think about them until you find a shape for them in a tale. There are problems with these claims of course. Nothing will take care of all sorrows, and we can’t be cured from living. But stories do help in all kinds of ways, and it makes sense to speak of literature as a source of therapy, as this remarkable book does.
We just need to be careful about our stories. Or rather, we need to stay away from too careful stories, stories that are neat and settled, too eager to arrive at their plausible endings.
The philosopher Galen Strawson, cited at the end of this work, eloquently decries the fashionable belief that we all need stories (and/or stories are all we need). ‘There is widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.’ But what exactly are the alternatives to story? We can all think of epiphanies, lyric moments, but what else is there? This book richly answers the question, and in this sense copes with one of its own most difficult paradoxes: how are we to be practical while remaining ‘in the service of something deeper than empiricism’.
Kelda Green reaches her solution through a close consultation of the works of Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot, and especially through her subtle attention to the pressure each author puts upon his or her predecessor, so that the very idea of therapy becomes a story that doesn’t end. Seneca’s wonderful insight into the mind’s remaking of the world – ‘A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is’ – must be true in some sense if the notion of psychology (and indeed of much of philosophy) is to have any meaning, but the truth is not binary: wretchedness has many components apart from the wretch’s conviction. And this is Dr Green’s recurring theme. We need to look at what she calls fault lines, claims whose truth lies in their fragility, logical instances ‘where the framework doesn’t quite accommodate reality’, and is faithful to reality for that reason.
Wordsworth offers the best examples here. Even the admirable Seneca and Montaigne lack his tolerance for disorder, although Montaigne’s flexibility is, as Dr Green suggests, ‘all the more constant for not being under fixed mental control’. Certainly Wordsworth goes further than anyone in his feeling that suffering and trauma cannot be ‘mere waste’. It is Wordsworth too who intimately portrays the action of the unconscious well before it became a celebrity – in the work of Eduard von Hartman, for example.

Strength came where weakness was not known to be,
At least not felt; and restoration came
Like an intruder knocking at the door
Of unacknowledged weariness. 1
We note that the unconscious here is offering ‘implicit therapy’, as Dr Green says, not clamouring for attention, as it so often does in Freud. ‘For Wordsworth, help works best when it occurs on a subliminal level, almost by psychologically syntactic stealth.’
And again: ‘Wordsworth’s is a model of progress that exists […] as an antidote to the overly linear, reductive pathways to recovery that are commonly prescribed by modern psychological therapies.’
George Eliot’s special contribution to this practical but undogmatic version of literature as a form of care is made clear by a particularly insightful reading of her novelistic methods. Who listens when a narrator says what a character can’t say (perhaps can’t even think)? Who is helped when characters are revealed, again and again, to be beyond rescue? Well, there is a ‘community of readers’ – at least there is if we are willing to take on that responsibility. ‘It is as if,’ Dr Green says, ‘unable to help her characters, George Eliot instead offers to her readers […] that which might have prevented or mitigated the internal tragedies of the novels.’ This is how we might imagine an alternative fate not for Dr Lydgate in Middlemarch but for some of the many (real and imaginary) persons enmeshed in marriages like his. ‘George Eliot translates Lydgate’s rough, deep approximations of feeling into language that can be seen and listened to, if not by Lydgate himself then instead by the reader who must then stand in for the character’s absent “listening-experiencing self.”’
The idea of literature as therapy seems attractive (or not) at first sight, and in any case appears to represent a large simplification of a complex set of possible relations between text and reader. This book makes an engaging case for the attraction of the idea, and firmly suggests that the second part of this impression is not the only available view. ‘It is important to recognise,’ Dr Green writes, ‘that much of what takes place, and much of what is of most value in the reading process is hidden, implicit, unquantifiable and entirely unsuitable for conventional formal study.’ And having recognised that we may, if we are patient and inventive, go on to speak of what is hidden and implicit, to ignore quantities and to find new conventions. The practical experiments reported in the second part of this work do just this. We learn once again that literature does not force anything on its readers, it ‘makes nothing happen’, as W. H. Auden famously said of poetry. But it allows ‘acts of returning and rethinking’ that could not take place without it, and it addresses what may be the hardest therapeutical question of all: ‘what to do with counsel that you know to be theoretically valuable but do not know how to make real?’ There is no single answer, and sometimes there is no answer at all. But one of the things that literature does best is to help us to live with absences as well as conflicting forms of presence.
Michael Wood
Professor of English, Emeritus
Princeton University

Note
1 William Wordsworth, The Prelude , The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850) , ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995), Book IV, ll. 145–48.
INTRODUCTION
This book is an exploration of the therapeutic potential held within literature. It examines the ways