The Psychology of Reading

Bibliotherapy is “the therapeutic approach employing books and other forms of literature, typically alongside more traditional therapy modalities, to support a patient’s mental health,” according to Psychology Today. Reading a book (particularly a novel) can not only help diminish negative emotions and encourage positive ones, therapists have found, but also heighten an individual’s self-worth and self-esteem.

Many believe bibliotherapy to be a rather new form of treatment, but it actually first surfaced in the post-World War II years when the mental health of the generation that would become known as baby boomers emerged as a major concern. As schools and classrooms ballooned, reading became increasingly framed within the context of a child’s personality development. David H. Russell observed in 1948, “The modern teacher does not ask herself, 'What is Johnny doing in reading?’ as often as she inquires, ‘What is reading doing to Johnny?’”

Until then, in fact, few if anyone in education or psychology had much of an idea of how reading affected children’s minds. Research suggested that reading sparked a host of psychological and emotional changes in young people, the good news being that all of them appeared to be positive. Both attitudes and behavior could be shaped by reading, according to the findings from a 1948 study led by Nila Banton Smith; attributes such as empathy, tolerance, and gratitude could be fostered by learning something new from the printed page, she and her team of researchers had happily uncovered.

Low-Brow or High-Brow
Interestingly, it didn’t matter much what children read to experience this salutary effect, striking a blow to the sharp division between “good” and “bad” literature. Similar results were reported after children read “low-brow” material—that is, comics, cheap detective stories, and Disney books—and “high-brow” material—that is, textbooks, “quality” fiction, and poetry. This came as quite a shock to more traditional educators and librarians (and parents!). Most impressively, perhaps, children's racial attitudes appeared to be changed for the better by reading certain books; the study found that reading could promote intercultural understanding—a primary goal after the horrors of World War II.

The recasting of reading as a therapeutic exercise for people of all ages swept through America in the fifties. “How can reading help children and adults face the problems of living in an anxious age?” Russell asked in 1952, also wondering, “How can it foster those adjustments, which constitute the healthy personality?” Even Russell conceded that was a tall order, however, not sure if spending time with a pile of books could re-engineer the workings of the human mind, especially one that was troubled.

The existing research in bibliotherapy was unclear, but many teachers had begun to use reading as an aid to the perceived emotional needs of students. Reading could be beneficial in cases of family issues or a lack of friends by providing a sense of security and belonging, it was thought—although how that exactly worked was not known. In her Emotional Difficulties in Reading, Beulah Kanter Ephron suggested that psychotherapists be enlisted in remedial reading efforts. Difficulties in reading were just a symptom of more serious personality problems, Ephron (a protégé of Ruth Strang, the leader of this line of thought) argued, thinking that school counselors should also be brought into the process.

Lose Yourself in a Book
Jumping ahead a few decades, Victor Nell offered his own thoughts on bibliotherapy in his 1988 Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. For Nell, reading was “as rousing, colorful and transfiguring as anything out there in the real world” and a rare opportunity to “acquire peace, become more powerful, and feel braver and wiser.”

Alongside such poetic musings, Nell provided statistics drawn from clinical research that lent evidence to his argument that reading offered psychological benefits to those who took the time to do it. Reading was not just a joyful experience but a nearly universal one, he pointed out, implying that there was a basic human drive to both produce and consume narrative. Losing oneself in a book, as the title of his suggested, was good for both brain and body, research has shown, something that devoted readers already knew.

Timothy Aubrey’s 2011 Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans also praised the therapeutic (both sociocultural and psychological) effects that literature could have on many readers. Reading helped college-educated members of the middle class navigate the terrain between the lowbrow and the highbrow, with a certain kind of novel paving the way to think of oneself in intellectual terms. Reading fiction loaded with characters dealing with complex emotions was thus more or less a form of self-help, something that fans of Oprah’s Book Club knew quite well.

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Most recently, neuroscience is showing that the ability of reading to function as a kind of healing agent appears to be based on brain chemistry. I am not a neuroscientist, but I have no doubt that an fMRI scan would show that the pleasure areas of my brain light up like a pinball machine when I read something that Agatha Christie wrote decades ago. Many fret that reading books will go away as online technology further encroaches upon everyday life, but I believe that literature will endure much in part due to its therapeutic power.