the level of consciousness. Once again, it is a question of a very ‘private’ transaction, in
which an exquisite degree of ‘matching’ is required between the external agent (book)
and the individual if any self-insight or change on the reader’s part is to be elicited. The
whole notion of bibliotherapy rests on the possibility of such matching.
The growing popularity of psychotherapy has in turn influenced narrative, which has
become increasingly confessional (dealing explicitly with aspects of inner life hitherto
considered entirely private), and increasingly concerned with abnormal mental and
emotional states. This has been true equally in adult and in young people’s fiction,
where ‘problem novels’ for adolescents have been a burgeoning area in publishing over
the past twenty years. The existence of such novels, dealing with highly individualised
problems (such as anorexia nervosa, see Pantanizopoulos 1989), appears to be the most
recent fictional manifestation of the individualisation of consciousness.
Bibliotherapy: a Twentieth-century NotionIn its broadest historical context, the concept of ‘bibliotherapy’ forms part of the ancient
dulcis et utile debate, in which some scholars advocated a role for literature as ‘useful’ or
‘instructive’ in some moral sense, while others maintained that stories and books existed
primarily or even purely to give pleasure. Since Greek and Roman times, one side or the
other has prevailed for periods of a century or more, but the weight of evidence has always
suggested that people continued to listen and read regardless of what the ‘experts’
thought. Within the field of children’s literature, the debate has focused in particular on
the ambiguous category of fairy tales, originally oral narratives which, having been
appropriated by ‘child culture’ from the nineteenth century, have been at varying times
attacked as dangerous, defended as ‘pure escapism’, and re-conceptualised as ‘morally
instructive’ or psychologically growthful.
In fact, there are few examples of successful and popular literature which do not offer
both delight and ‘instruction’ in some form or other. The debate seems rather to reflect a
continuing moral uneasiness, in which the intensity with which humans have always
immersed themselves in ‘story’ has prompted us to seek justification for an involvement
so seemingly unrelated to the hard business of daily life.
Simsova (1968), Hatt (1976) and Nell (1988) all draw attention to the extraordinary
work of Nicholas Rubakin in the USSR in the 1920s, work which anticipates by nearly
half a century the claim of reader-response theory that readers experience texts in their
own images (Holland 1975). Rubakin also argued for something akin to Piagetian
‘schemas’ as facilitating comprehension, and recognised the possibility of ‘scientifically’
matching types of readers with types of books (the typology of reader personalities being
broadly based on Jung’s system). Such an enterprise of social engineering was likely
enough to appeal to a revolutionary government, but Rubakin’s ideas were never fully
operationalised even in the USSR, and in the West (like his fellow Russians Vladimir
Propp and Kornei Chukovsky) Rubakin achieved no recognition until many years after
the first appearance of his work.
Rubakin’s pioneering efforts were not strictly directed towards ‘therapy’. The idea of
bibliotherapy as such seems to have originated in Germany and the USA in the early
years of the century, but in Britain the term ‘reading therapy’ has been preferred until
630 BIBLIOTHERAPY AND PSYCHOLOGY