For the past few years, after having published a book on the use of literary texts as sources of comfort (Literature and Consolation – Edinburgh University Press, 2021), I have been working on a wide range of topics that fall under the very broad umbrella of ‘bibliotherapy’, the use of books and other fictional reading materials for effects of wellbeing. In the United Kingdom, the term is being increasingly used to refer to a practice where people who call themselves bibliotherapists (in a not officially legitimized way; so it’s not a profession involving a degree, say, even though that doesn’t mean it’s not legitimate) prescribe specific reading materials to individuals. Last year, two of those individuals published a book, entitled in both cases Bibliotherapy, in which they explain the basic tenets of this practice and give a series of reading suggestions related to specific existential problems of crises: Bijal Shah, Bibliotherapy. The Healing Power of Reading (Piatkus, 2024) and Molly Masters, Bibliotherapy Books to Guide You through Every Chapter of Life (Harper Collins, 2024).
The core of the practice seems to be the conviction that if a specific book has been ‘healthy’ for one reader, it is bound to be so for other readers as well, much in the way that regular medicinal products are expected to work for groups of people rather than for individuals. An extreme version of this idea can be found in Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin’s The Novel Cure, a 2013 forerunner of these more recent books which presents itself in its subtitle as an ‘A-Z of Literary Remedies’ – the premise of each of the 400 (roughly) literary prescriptions and reading suggestions that make up this 450-page volume is the same: if you have this or that problem(heartbreak, midlife crisis, being a goody-goody),then reading this book will do the trick for you. In other words, the reader is treated here not as an individual with an individual problem in an individual context, but as a generic person, an interchangeable case. To pursue the medical metaphor, one could say that reading a book in this type of bibliotherapy is very much like taking medication: a quite passive act, it only requires swallowing, as it were.
My own idea of bibliotherapy (a practice that I would describe as ‘literary care’ rather than actual therapy) starts from a different premise, exemplified in another book that is entitled ‘bibliotherapy’, but was originally published in French in 1994: its author, the French philosopher and rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin, draws heavily on the existential hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, in which reading is not only seen as an act of co-creation, but one which is engaged and concerns the individual identity of the person reading. Indeed, the practice of reading here impacts that individual identity quite fundamentally – reading makes you more aware of who you are, and who you are in the process of becoming, and it does so by inviting you think about yourself in connection to the book that you’re reading and the characters that fill its world. Also, the book is not seen here as the solution to a problem or a given crisis, but as a companion in an ongoing process of personal and hence individual development that enables one to be better equipped to deal with problems and crises once they occur. If we want to pursue the medical metaphor, I would say that this is more a case of preventive medicine than actual curative medicine. It’s more a matter of novel care than of novel cure.
Shared Reading is a method developed in the context of The Reader Organisation, a Liverpool-based charity founded in 2008 (in practice going back to 1997) by British literary scholar Jane Davis, who wanted to convey to other people the force of reading literary texts that she herself experienced when as a youngster, coming from an impoverished background, she first felt the positively embracing impact of reading fiction on her self-image. That impact is hard to capture in full, but it can be described, I think, by a number of terms that are confirmed by empirical research into the practice of shared reading : empowerment would be one of those (the idea that literary writings provided young Jane Davis with models she could use to navigate difficult circumstances in way that strengthened her resilience), solidarity (the realization that one is not alone in fighting those difficult circumstances, that others have been doing this as well and have been successful in doing it), but also multiperspectivism, the awareness that there was not one way of looking at the real, that the perspectives of others could show you different ways of looking at the circumstances you found yourself in, and that those perspectives could open up a reality that you felt yourself secluded in and that you found impossible to bear or to escape from.
The method of Shared Reading Jane Davis designed for the Reader Organisation is meant to bring those issues to the table around which Shared Reading operates: it’s a table (nicely dressed, containing coffee and tea with some biscuits) where on average some eight individuals who don’t necessarily know each other, meet to read collectively a short story and a poem that were selected for the occasion by a person called the Reader Leader, whose task it is to read aloud to the other members the text (which every participant is given at the meeting, so it’s not distributed beforehand which means that participants cannot read it beforehand). The Reader Leader is also there to facilitate a conversation about and around the texts, a conversation that is not meant to result in the ‘right’ interpretation of them but, rather, in the sharing of perspectives on it, perspectives that revolve around the question of how the readers relate to the text but also to each other: the insights that come from these conversations are meant to be differential and related at the same time.
Shared Reading is meant to forge connections among participants who, starting from the text and coming back to it at regular intervals, talk about their own lives, their experiences, their backgrounds in relation to topics brought up by the text. These experiences are in turn enriched by similarities and differences with experiences that other members of the group may express in response to the text and to what others are inspired to say about it. Every now and then in the course of the reading of the text, the Reader Leader stops and invites participants to respond to open prompts that are rooted in the text: how does this specific passage feel for you? What does it remind you of? How do you feel about what this character is saying or doing? Have you been in similar circumstances? What would you do if you were in the shoes of this character? What the method is not after is a discussion of writing techniques or narratological insights, or information about the author of the text or the specific tradition or school that they come from. The method is after experiences of readers, plural, in connection with the text and with other readers: the idea is that by discussing your experience in the presence of others will enrich that experience and deepen your understanding, not just of the text that you are reading together, but of your relationship to others and, possibly most importantly, to yourself.
The Shared Reading method is used and has been tested in different sets of circumstances with different groups of participants: in setting of mental health facilities, in prisons, in schools, in institutions for the elderly, also including the possibility of designing specific sessions for participants struggling with dementia. The settings may be different, but what happens in them, ideally (and I have had the experience to witness this in several of the above contexts, both as participant and as Reader Leader) is very similar: talking about specific passages in texts, generally about what characters in these texts do (or don’t do) and think or say (or don’t think and don’t say) the participants begin to talk about how they see these things, ideally not in unison: the text ideally opens up a plurality of perspectives, inviting every participant (in a context of safety, not obligation) to offer their view. The text in away both allows the different perspectives to come into being and relates them to each other: what the participants have in common in the practice of Shared Reading is the text and the moment in which they discover it (and themselves) gradually.
How can this reading practice be seen as a form of care? In trying to answer that question I will be drawing centrally on Neil Vickers and Derek Bolton’s recently published Being Ill (Reaktion, 2025)..The authors are colleagues at King’s College London’s Centre for the Humanities and Health, where Neil Vickers (an epidemiologist in a previous career) is a professor of literature with a specific interest in medical issues and Derek Bolton a (recently retired) professor of philosophy and psychopathology, working also as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry and the London-based Maudsley Hospital.
The book’s central message is already contained in its subtitle: On Sickness, Care and Abandonment. When we fall victim to a major disease, whether it be mental and/or bodily, the authors claim, one of two possible outcomes will await us: we will either be cared for or be left alone – in both cases by those whom we feel close to. Care is the central topic of Being Ill’s second (and in my view strongest) chapter.For Vickers and Bolton, care involves three main aspects: mirroring, holding and compassion. Let me try to make clear how reading literature, specifically in the context of the format of shared Reading, can be related to these.
Mirroring, the first of Vickers’ and Bolton’s concepts, refers to what the authors of Being Ill define as a ‘set of processes by which two people indicate their awareness of one another’ (77). They take the concept from the domain of infant research, where mirroring refers to the mutually defining practice of mothers and babies. Infants mirror what their primary carers show them, in a complex interplay of bodily and mental activities that simultaneously stress the child’s dependence on the mother and its capacity to grow into independence. This basic idea alsounderlies Vickers’ and Bolton’s concept of care in the adult world: a productive understanding of what care is and does, in their view, should not overstress the basic helplessness of the person cared for but be mindful to safeguard for this person pockets of autonomy and, hence, the possibility of self-care. To care for somebody, in other words, also means to enable that person to develop, maintain or strengthen the possibility of self-care. And this is what SR does or at least/aims for; in that sense the practice is a practice of care.
Scholars of literature tend to relate the notion of mirroring to a cognitive analysis of the reading process: the immediate reference would then be to mirror neurons and how their activity underlies what cognitivists call our ‘theory of mind’, the capacity of human beings to attribute states of mind to other beings. The work of Lisa Zunshine is primarily devoted to the question how reading literature affects this capacity, possibly offering readers opportunities to train this capacity and to become better mind-readers in real life.
It only seems logical that the theory of mind approach in literary studies quite often takes as its central point of attention the representation of fictional characters, their states of mind, but also their behaviour and the possibility that from this behaviour we may be able to infer (rightly or wrongly) their state of mind. This is also what happens in the practice of shared reading: participant-discussions often focus on what characters are doing, thinking or feeling (and on the inevitable links between those), but also on the question of what the readers themselves would do if they found themselves in similar circumstances; the participants are putting themselves in the shoes of the characters, so to say, and in doing so they not only come to a new understanding of these characters but also of themselves.
On top of that, the process of mirroring in this specific format is not limited to the interaction between fictional character and individual reader – in listening to each other and in witnessing bodily and other responses of other readers to the same text, the participants also mirror one another. The effect of that specific process is on the one hand an understanding of how others interpret the text, often differently, but also a differential understanding of one’s own perspective, as it comes into being in relation with that of others.
Vickers’ and Bolton’s second ‘pillar’ of care, ‘holding’, also derives from the field of developmental child psychology, more specifically from Donald Winnicott’s repeated reflections on the concept. As in their reflections on mirroring, Vickers and Bolton make a strong case for the possibility to apply this theory to adult relationships in general and to relationships of care with ill people in particular. In situations of illness, they write, the importance of ‘holding’ shows clearly, not only in the need to find a good ‘holding environment’ (Winnicott’s term for the safe haven in which care can also do its work unnoticed), but also in the importance of practices of ‘creative participation’ (69) (what Winnicott termed ‘play’) that enable caregivers and the persons they care for to establish and maintain meaningful relationships. For Winnicott, the practice of holding is meant to allow infants to thrive; while the word may sound strange in the context of severe cases of illness, this is precisely what Vickers and Bolton would like to see patients and the people that we care for do.
Winnicott’s notion of ‘the holding environment’ is an interesting one to describe what Shared Reading-groups do: these groups are ideally safe spaces, spaces in which participants feel encouraged (not at all forced) to say what they want to say, both in response to the text being read and to comments by fellow readers. Specific text passages and the questions that the Reader Leader draws from them, function as prompts, but not in the directive sense of that word – they invite a spoken response (while allowing the possibility of a silent one) that is not about the correct understanding of this or that detail in the text, but about what they bring to mind for each and every reader.
If the reading group can be said to function as a holdingenvironment in which these reflections can be safely shared, so in an important way does the text itself. In Winnicott’s theory, the activity of holding (in the case of infants by the mother figure) is an activity of support (and hence dependence) that is meant to result in the development of more autonomy (and hence independence), and in a way that is how the text in the format of Shared Reading also works: it supports (‘holds’) different interpretations and reflections that it inspires in different readers and it holds these together, in their diversity and its difference from them. The text, in other words, is an object out there, that exists apart from the different interpretations and reflections that participants have: it cannot be reduced to any single response. Also, as several participants with whom I spoke about the effects of Shared Reading confirm, without the texts the conversations would not happen.
Assuch, as I have written elsewhere, literary texts (fictional texts) function as what Winnicott calls ‘transitional objects’: they enable a process of development that allows readers to arrive at an interpretation of the text that they can see as wholly theirs, while at the same time come to an understanding that the text exists apart from this interpretation and that, hence, other readers can interpret it differently. Texts, in their capacity of transitional objects are not what Winnicott calls ‘projective entities’: they don’t simply coincide with our usage of them, they allow a different usage by other readers as well.
‘Compassion’, Vickers and Bolton’s third conceptual pillar of care, is a quality quite often related to the reading of literary writings. Many cognitive scholars of literature have argued for the power of literature in fostering empathy, and Shared Reading practitioners (both Reader Leaders and participants) will have plenty of examples to confirm this. The collective practice not only stimulates our empathy with fictional characters, as we try to imagine what they think and feel, but also with our fellow readers in the group. Sharing our thoughts on the texts that we read, we are taking care – of the texts, of each other, of ourselves.
Jürgen Pieters – Professor of Literary Theory at the Department of Literary Studies, University of Ghent