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  • 9 - The Uses of Literature and Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Reading Groups

  • from Part II - In Society
  • Edited by Vera J. Camden, Kent State University, Ohio
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Psychoanalysis
    Published online:
    16 December 2021
    Print publication:
    16 December 2021, pp 168-186

  • Summary

    This chapter draws on the thinking of Freud, Bion, Ricoeur, Winnicott, as well as on the literary-psychoanalytic writings of Adam Phillips and Christopher Bollas, to consider the value of psychoanalytic thinking and procedures in understanding the experience of reading literature in groups. The chapter argues that shared literary reading – specifically the live read-aloud model pioneered and practised by UK charity The Reader – creates conditions analogous to those of the psychoanalytic situation, particularly in providing a "holding" environment for, and stimulating the release of, unconscious material in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. In addition, the neutrality of the literary text in respect of the reader’s inner life makes available a wide range of possible interpretations of the unconscious material disclosed (in place of the single interpretative authoritative of the therapist) while also offering a personal-human language for interpretation and expression (in place of the language of therapeutic orthodoxy).