relatively recently. Jean M.Clarke (in Clarke and Postle 1988) summarises the
development of this practice in Britain from the initial stage in which the provision of
libraries for patients in mental hospitals was vaguely seen as ‘a good thing’ and reading
as vaguely ‘curative’ without any apparent grasp of the dynamics involved (or the
manifest potential difficulties). Much later in the century, librarians working in hospitals
were joined by a handful of social workers who had independently concluded that
reading might be a source of insight and cure.
In the idealistic and therapeutically oriented culture of the USA, the idea of
bibliotherapy has enjoyed a somewhat wider constituency (Pardeck 1984). Fader and
McNeil’s Hooked On Books (1969) directed attention to a single client group (alienated
and anti-print teenagers) and their enthusiastic anecdotal evidence of triumphant
success in transforming teenagers into bookaholics inspired a generation of teachers.
The idea that reading was in itself a ‘wonder drug’ with the power to ‘transform lives’
was not new, but it led to a number of attempts to use books to alleviate individual and
social ills; thus Manning and Casbergue (1988) outline ‘Bibliotherapy for children in
step families’. In Pittsburg, Elizabeth Segal and Joan Friedberg set up a modestly-
conceived but eventually nationally influential programme to bring quality picture books
into the homes of the city’s poor, in order to encourage early literacy and to promote
cultural enrichment (Segal 1989). More strictly ‘therapeutic’ was Butler’s work in New
Zealand. Cushla and Her Books (Butler 1979) argues that picture books were
instrumental in the rehabilitation of a multiple handicapped child.
The basic idea of bibliotherapy, as established by (predominantly) librarians runs
approximately as follows. A child or adult has a problem. A skilled librarian, teacher or
(Clarke would prefer) ‘reading therapist’, suggests a story which in some way bears on
that problem. If the intervention is successful, the reader recognises that the book has
something personally significant to say to him/her, perhaps becomes conscious of the
dimensions of his/her own problem, and sometimes perceives potential solutions to it.
The reader then returns the book to the professional, perhaps wishing to discuss it (and
through it, his or her own problems), perhaps asking for more books ‘like that one’,
which the professional then sensitively provides on the basis of feedback as to the
reader’s reception of the first.
The practical obstacles to the widespread employment of such a process, as opposed
to the broader applications of ‘reading as enrichment’ mentioned above, are
considerable. With the possible exception of staff in small private mental institutions or
private boarding schools, few librarians are likely ever to know their constituents well
enough, or have time enough, to play such a role, which requires both intimate
knowledge of the individual and wide knowledge of literature. Moreover, bibliotherapy is
open to ethical objections if it is foisted upon mental patients or older children without
their having requested it, and (more pragmatically) will in such cases almost certainly be
resisted openly or covertly. Worse still, existing bibliotherapeutic theory seems
inadequately informed as to how narratives actually interact with human lives.
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