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
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
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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
Figures
5.1The three passages used in experiment one
5.2Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract one
5.3The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract one
5.4Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract one
5.5Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract two
5.6The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract two
5.7Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract two
5.8Verbs used in the first person in response to the news article
5.9Verbs used in the first person in response to the poetry extracts
7.1The letters written by each participant in experiment three
Tables
5.1Experiment one: Sample information
5.2The order of direct quotations in participant A2’s response to poetry extract one
6.1Experiment two: Sample information
7.1Experiment three: Sample information
‘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