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
1William Wordsworth, The Prelude, The Four Texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850), ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (London: Penguin, 1995), Book IV, ll. 145–48.
This book is an exploration of the therapeutic potential held within literature. It examines the ways in which literature has served – since ancient times – as a repository for collective human thinking and a source of what we would now call therapy. It argues for the ongoing need for literary thinking and literary models of care, repair and human connection in the world today. Through a combination of literary analysis and practical experimentation, I have sought to provide a contribution to the relation of the reading of literature to the practice of psychology, arguing throughout that literature has a vital role to play in the real world, while insisting that the methods of close literary analysis and literary thinking are preserved.
Chapter 1 considers Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in relation to the Stoic philosophy out of which, it has been argued, it derives its origins. Through an examination of the letters of Seneca and the tragic vision that precedes them in his plays, I have sought to reconstruct a context for Stoic therapy within a more profound world order than is understood within the modern psychological therapies that have partially evolved from it.
Chapter 2 explores the essays of the sixteenth-century philosopher Montaigne, as a reader of Seneca. It examines his adaptation of Stoicism into a personal form of thinking within praxis, adding a further dimension to Seneca’s epistles. It is argued that through reading, writing and rewriting, Montaigne creates an individualistic model for, but also counterexample to, what we might today call self-examination and self-help. The essays are also linked forward to both the self-reflexive processes of psychoanalysis and to Freud’s own work as an essayist and thinker preoccupied with the individual self, with relation (for example) to Adam Phillips’s Freudian-based work on the linkage between psychoanalysis and the reading of serious literature.
Chapter 3 takes a second major creative reader of Seneca two hundred years after Montaigne. It examines William Wordsworth’s poetic use of Stoicism and his move beyond Stoicism towards a philosophy of transmutation. More broadly, this chapter presents the case for the particular and distinctly therapeutic forms of literary thinking that are contained within Wordsworth’s poetry, not least because, as representative of a reformed poetic to serve ordinary life, it was held by several readers and commentators to be vital to the recuperation of the Western psyche. The patterns of psychoanalysis, as outlined in Freud’s essay ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, are an important point of comparison in Chapter 3, in relation to the restorative and revisionary patterns of Wordsworth’s poetry.
Chapter 4 sets out the connections between George Eliot and Wordsworth. It examines George Eliot’s contribution to the nineteenth-century development of psychology and argues that there is a specific and useful model of therapy contained with her realist novels, just as surely as within Wordsworth’s poetry of common nature. It is argued that George Eliot is a ‘proto-psychoanalyst’ who in stern demand requires patients to stay in their difficulties, with relation to her own realist novelist’s version of what Freud was to call ‘the reality principle’.
Of course, these four central figures are my choices and could have been otherwise (St Augustine’s reading of Seneca or Byron’s reading of Montaigne are two specific examples). But the principle remains – that each author acts as a representative of a different literary form in relation to problems of human psychology: Seneca the philosopher-playwright, Montaigne the essayist, Wordsworth the poet and George Eliot the novelist. As such, this book demonstrates how different forms can create different – and yet analogous – spaces in which to do existential thinking.
The four authors were selected due to the strong links between them: Montaigne is a reader of Seneca, Wordsworth is a reader of Seneca and George Eliot is a reader of Wordsworth as well as the Senecan-influenced Spinoza. Furthermore, these four authors have had strong influence upon the future that came after them, with particular relation to what might now be called (albeit perhaps too reductively) mental health and well-being. There are well-established links between Seneca and modern psychological techniques for effecting calm (outlined in Chapter 1). Montaigne’s Essays offer a vital model of personal and practical psychology, an individualistic experiment born out of his reading of Stoicism. Wordsworth became established for future generations as the archetypal ‘healing poet’, and the work of George Eliot, I will argue, had a significant role within the intellectual climate that helped found the discipline of psychology itself.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 set out the results of three practical reading experiments. These studies were designed to test the theoretical and literary work that sits alongside them in ways that would not generally be accommodated by a traditional piece of literary scholarship. They are exploratory attempts at multidisciplinary thinking and try, in some way, to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences, between theory and practice, and between private concerns and public health. The experimental work of this book is indebted to research carried out by the Centre for Research into Reading,