Bibliotherapy Techniques — What Are They and Do They Work?
A lot of the value that comes from the therapeutic reading process, is often unquantifiable given the private and intimate not to mention subjective experience of the reader yet we have the likes of Dr Kelda Green and her experiments on Therapeutic Reading that have shown us strong evidence of the therapeutic power of reading as part of her 2020 dissertation at the University of Liverpool’s Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society.
Dr Kelda Green’s experiments focused on creating a space for readers to engage with a work of literature on their own personal terms, in a private setting where they were able to reflect on the text without it feeling like a purely academic exercise — i.e. by giving readers full autonomy and the unstructuredness that make therapy sessions in traditional therapist settings successful.
Secondly, the experiments gave readers a way to capture the impact that the reading of certain texts and poetry had on them through open enquiry and a stream of consciousness approach. This free flow meant that they were not pressured to conform to any standard of documenting evidence or measuring the experience to a pre-calibrated scale that might not capture their experience wholly. Her experiments have been influenced by I.A. Richard’s Practical Criticism (1929) which was the first large-scale…
