CONTENTS

       List of Illustrations

       Foreword

       Introduction

       Part I Four Models

       1.Senecan Tragedy and Stoic Philosophy

2.Therapy and the Essay: Montaigne, after Seneca

3.Therapy and Poetry: Wordsworth, after Seneca

       4.Therapy and the Novel: George Eliot, after Wordsworth

       Part II Three Experiments

       5.Experiment One: A First Reading

       6.Experiment Two: Slowing Down and Tuning In

       7.Experiment Three: Writing Back

       Conclusion

       Bibliography

       Index

       ILLUSTRATIONS

      Figures

       5.1The three passages used in experiment one

       5.2Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract one

       5.3The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract one

       5.4Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract one

       5.5Graph showing the most frequently quoted lines of poetry extract two

       5.6The most frequently quoted sections of poetry extract two

       5.7Graphs showing the order of direct quotations used in each participant response to poetry extract two

       5.8Verbs used in the first person in response to the news article

       5.9Verbs used in the first person in response to the poetry extracts

       7.1The letters written by each participant in experiment three

      Tables

       5.1Experiment one: Sample information

       5.2The order of direct quotations in participant A2’s response to poetry extract one

       6.1Experiment two: Sample information

       7.1Experiment three: Sample information

       FOREWORD

      ‘All sorrows can be borne’, the writer Karen Blixen once said, ‘if you put them in a story, or tell a story about them’, and this belief is often thought to lie behind much of the work of psychoanalysis: not just a talking cure but a telling cure. You won’t be able to manage your need or distress or even think about them until you find a shape for them in a tale. There are problems with these claims of course. Nothing will take care of all sorrows, and we can’t be cured from living. But stories do help in all kinds of ways, and it makes sense to speak of literature as a source of therapy, as this remarkable book does.

      We just need to be careful about our stories. Or rather, we need to stay away from too careful stories, stories that are neat and settled, too eager to arrive at their plausible endings.

      The philosopher Galen Strawson, cited at the end of this work, eloquently decries the fashionable belief that we all need stories (and/or stories are all we need). ‘There is widespread agreement that human beings typically see or live or experience their lives as a narrative or story of some sort, or at least as a collection of stories.’ But what exactly are the alternatives to story? We can all think of epiphanies, lyric moments, but what else is there? This book richly answers the question, and in this sense copes with one of its own most difficult paradoxes: how are we to be practical while remaining ‘in the service of something deeper than empiricism’.

      Kelda Green reaches her solution through a close consultation of the works of Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot, and especially through her subtle attention to the pressure each author puts upon his or her predecessor, so that the very idea of therapy becomes a story that doesn’t end. Seneca’s wonderful insight into the mind’s remaking of the world – ‘A man is as wretched as he has convinced himself that he is’ – must be true in some sense if the notion of psychology (and indeed of much of philosophy) is to have any meaning, but the truth is not binary: wretchedness has many components apart from the wretch’s conviction. And this is Dr Green’s recurring theme. We need to look at what she calls fault lines, claims whose truth lies in their fragility, logical instances ‘where the framework doesn’t quite accommodate reality’, and is faithful to reality for that reason.

      Wordsworth offers the best examples here. Even the admirable Seneca and Montaigne lack his tolerance for disorder, although Montaigne’s flexibility is, as Dr Green suggests, ‘all the more constant for not being under fixed mental control’. Certainly Wordsworth goes further than anyone in his feeling that suffering and trauma cannot be ‘mere waste’. It is Wordsworth too who intimately portrays the action of the unconscious well before it became a celebrity – in the work of Eduard von Hartman, for example.

      Strength came where weakness was not known to be,

      At least not felt; and restoration came

      Like an intruder knocking at the door

Of