Bibliotherapy: Reading for well-being and healing

(Last of two parts)

Fiction speaks to readers’ imagination, which keeps their interest and attention.

Stories expand our knowledge of other peoples’ lives, helping us to see similarities and differences. They also reduce the “strangeness” of others.

Stories create the therapeutic distance needed to see the problem and to explore the pain in a safer, less defensive manner. Readers are able to identify the characters’ struggles so they may reflect on their own.

An interesting study by David Kidd and Emanuele Castano in “Science” (October 2014) gives us a clue to why certain books are more helpful than others.

The researchers compared the effects of reading popular fiction (Amazon best sellers) and reading literary fiction (National Book Award or canonical writers) on developing the Theory of Mind, the ability to detect and understand other people’s emotions.

The five experiments concluded that fiction works better than nonfiction; but, more significantly, the results showed that reading literary fiction enhances the readers’ Theory of Mind, more than reading popular fiction.

Jerome Bruner, in 1986, explained in his book “Actual Minds, Possible Worlds” that literary fiction triggered rethinking of our presuppositions. It also provided readers with multiple perspectives and forced us to fill in the gaps and search for meaning among a range of meanings. All these enabled the development of the Theory of Mind.

According to researchers Kidd and Castano, “literary fiction uses devices that ‘defamiliarize’ its readers. It is replete with complicated individuals whose inner lives are rarely and easily discerned but would warrant exploration.”

While clinical bibliotherapy may require skilled practitioners to help clients process their serious emotional problems, classroom teachers (and parents) can also use developmental bibliotherapy to help their students (or children).

By carefully choosing a repertoire of good books appropriate to the children’s ages on topics that deal with predictable problems at each stage of development, teachers and parents can guide and facilitate their students’ (or children’s) emotional growth and well-being by letting them experience what problems the story characters are facing, which are either beautifully resolved or provokingly unresolved.

By identifying the concerns of students and children before actual problems have set in, teachers and parents may help their students and children to be more prepared to deal with the problems when they do occur and to cope with growing pains, rather than have students and children thinking they have to face problems by themselves.

I wish I can write fiction; but no, all the things I have written and published are nonfiction.

My daughter is the fiction writer in the family. She has more than 30 short stories published here and abroad. And I could see that she enjoys reading and the writing process, thriving in a genre that really is therapeutic for her.

Working full-time as a teacher in college in the daytime, she makes writing her nighttime vocation. Her perspectives on things are well-informed, fair and balanced—and mature, even when she was at a young age.

I love to try writing fiction someday—perhaps in another life. But I will continue to read fiction for my well-being and I will not trade my books—and music—for any other leisure activities, except traveling.

Reading keeps me calm and collected. A good chapter of a great book is the only medicine I need when I feel restless or bored, or even when I am upset about something.

The windows open wide to a life beyond the mundane and trite to a whole new world of fresh air.

Grace Shangkuan Koo, PhD, is a professor of Educational Psychology at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Affective Learning is one of the many graduate courses that she handles. E-mail her at [email protected].