Bibliotherapy
The art of reading for wellbeing
with Nicole Moody
Discover the link between reading and wellbeing to enhance your everyday life.
What is Bibliotherapy?
Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic practice that uses literature, such as books, poetry, and stories, to support mental health, aid emotional healing, and foster personal growth.
Bibliotherapy dates back to ancient times when libraries were seen as sacred places where answers and healing could be found. Read more>>
What to expect from my Bibliotherapy courses
My bibliotherapy courses explore reading as an active strategy to help cope with life’s challenges, looking at the wider and deeper ways in which fiction and non-fiction can “find” people, emotionally and imaginatively, help develop self-esteem, emotional granularity and improve interpersonal relationships.
Participants will be introduced to the neurological benefits of reading “for pleasure” and to wellbeing frameworks to help us better tailor our book choices in order to thrive. View my current courses, events and retreats >>
“Literature offers us a powerful language that can help us understand ourselves and others and gives us the words and perspectives that can help us talk about difficult experiences.”
– Dr Jane Davis, Founder of The Reader
“One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.”
– DH Lawrence, The Letters of DH Lawrence
BE PART OF OUR NEXT BIBLIOTHERAPY EVENT
Bespoke private events available for companies, organisations, institutions, clubs, libraries and schools.
Explore the power of Bibliotherapy with Nicole Moody
An introduction on how we use literature to improve wellbeing, expression, interpersonal relationships, sense of accomplishment, and more…
Discover more about Bibliotherapy...
Bibliotherapy is an ancient practice that originates from the Greek word for books and healing. It uses a therapeutic approach, recognising that humans respond to stories in powerful and meaningful ways that can impact our state of mind and wellbeing. The term was first coined in 1916 by American researcher Samuel McChord Crothers and thereafter slowly entered the medical lexicon. Dorland’s 1941 Illustrated Medical Dictionary recognized bibliotherapy as an official mental health treatment and during World War I, when the Library War Service helped develop the science of bibliotherapy as they distributed books to patients in military hospitals. In the 1920s, the United States began hosting training programs for bibliotherapy at universities. As the concept made its way into academia, the term started popping up in medical journals.
In the 1950s, Carolyn Shrodes engaged with this concept further, offering a theoretical model based on the idea that story can influence readers directly, by offering an effective means to process through identification, juxtaposition, catharsis, and insight. This echoes Aristotle’s central idea of the power of catharsis – the release, the pity we feel not only for the characters but for ourselves – involved in experiencing tragedy. Shroder emphasised the power of the vicarious reading experience and the response of the client who is encouraged to interpret, respond, empathise and learn from the process outlined in a text that resonates with them. In The Reading Teacher, published in 1955, Shrodes described it as such:
“Bibliotherapy is grounded in the theory that there is an integral relationship between the dynamics of personality and the nature of vicarious experience. It is the process of dynamic interaction between the personality of the reader and the imaginative literature which may engage their emotions and free them for conscious and productive use.”
My experience of teaching and facilitating bibliotherapy has been that its greatest power comes from combining the dynamic language of literature or poetry with the dynamic quality intrinsic in group work. Shared reading, even if it is just for a few minutes, brings a new type of attention. As Marcel Proust wrote, good reading is not a passive but a creative act, ‘the fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.’ It can also bring us to explore new parts of ourselves. A simple exercise, such as using a line from poetry as a writing prompt, when carried out in a group, takes on a playfulness that helps us unleash our creativity and unheard voices within ourselves.