the reader’s own ‘problem’ or life situation, it is far more likely that the ‘merging’ of
reader and text will occur when the correspondence is partly or wholly metaphorical
rather than literal.
Human addiction to ‘story’ is an aspect of our symbol-making nature: our very
language is strongly metaphorical and our dreaming almost always uses the language of
symbol and analogy. When we read a story that is obviously very similar in its
characters and events to our own life experience, we may read it with enjoyment and
appreciation, consciously appreciating the parallels; but if our life experience is painful,
then we may reject such a story altogether.
Thus when offered a short text (Wild’s Beast (1993)) featuring a protagonist with
obsessive-compulsive symptoms, three early adolescent boys with similar symptoms
read only a few pages, or failed to read the novel at all, although their reading skills were
more than adequate for the task, because, as they said, the protagonists were too much
like themselves. Daniels (1992), on the other hand, describes an orphaned Vietnamese
adolescent living in Britain who was deeply affected by a novel about a porpoise who
becomes separated from its mother and is cruelly treated by its human captors.
The emergence of ur-narrative so early in human life strongly suggests that story is
indeed a ‘natural’ mode of self-expression and self-healing. But for a print text to ‘plug
into’ the inner newsreel and temporarily replace it as an ongoing source of images,
feelings and self-talk, exquisitely fine unconscious matching must occur, so that the
reader ‘recognises’ something of high personal significance, while simultaneously failing
to pin down its precise meaning. I maintain (Crago 1993) that such matching is akin to
‘falling in love’. In both cases, an instinctive, largely unconscious recognition of
similarity occurs, while consciously, the individuals concerned are aware only of a
powerful emotional ‘pull’ and a sense of ‘rightness’ or ‘fitness’ in being with the other
person (or text). Texts that are self-selected on such a basis are likely to be read and re-
read with total absorption.
In this ‘systemic’ model of reader—text interaction, readers ‘influence’ books, rather
than the other way around (Holland 1975) But when preferred texts are read again and
again, or are brooded over in memory, they become, in turn, potent shaping influences
over the reader’s future self concept and life path. Key texts then become ‘potentiating
devices’, eliciting from individuals the full development of what is already latent within
them, but which might never flower otherwise. Needless to say, such potentiation can
occur both for good and for ill. Der Ring des Niebelungen and Also Sprache Zarathustra
may have ‘potentiated’ Hitler’s grandiose and paranoid fantasies; Wagner and Nietzsche
are not therefore responsible for the Holocaust or the Second World War.
Here the theory of literary response begins to converge with recent developments
within the field of psychotherapy where, quite independently of the bibliotherapy
movement, the 1980s brought a new consciousness of the power of ‘therapeutic story-
telling’ as an intervention device. Probably originating in Jay Haley’s (1973) lively
account of the therapeutic ‘wizardry’ of Milton Erickson, the concept of therapeutic
story-telling has been picked up and popularised. Cameron-Bandler (1978), Gordon
(1978), and Mills and Crowley (1986) all emphasise the power of metaphor to ‘slip past’
the defences of the conscious mind.
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