Take our Do I Need Therapy?

Find a therapist near me

Bibliotherapy may be employed as a means to heighten or expand the dialogue and deepen core issues discussed.

How a therapist handles a reaction to stories itself becomes the therapy.

The right book, the right client, the right time are critical considerations before considering bibliotherapy.

Therapists: Settle into your own creativity and write from your heart/mind and watch what reveals itself.

The therapeutic use of literary works of art--novels, short stories, and the like--fall under the broad term bibliotherapy when employed as a means to heighten or expand the dialogue, deepen the core issues discussed and connect them the the kind of universal themes touched on by a book. Books, movies, television shows can all provide the kind of art which a mature psychotherapy client might read themselves into and then, as they relate to key characters, situations, or settings in the work, spark fruitful discussions within the therapeutic frame and help bring them to even greater levels of integration, completion, ego integrity and wholeness.

Who among us in the psychotherapy community hasn't recommended a book, movie, or show to our clients that we thought might reach the affect in novel ways and from evocative or oblique angles to provide a kind of consulting room hypertext? As a medical student and psychotherapy patient in the early nineties I was introduced to this approach and found the prescription of the late-in-life romantic drama Shadowlands starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as C.S. Lewis an immensely useful prod to my reluctance to genuinely and profoundly feel and express emotion about a kind of grief I........

© Psychology Today