[10-13] Bibliotherapeutic health humanities: Literature as a site for a therapeutic hermeneutics of experience in relation to recovering from trauma
Presentation language：English
Literature, similar to CBT and Gestalt Therapy, offers a hermeneutics of experience. Cognitive based therapeutic approaches focus on how perception creates meaning, interpretation, and certain thoughts and behaviors. A key strategy in cognitive based therapies is based on thought experiments to test automatic thinking and perceptions in order to correct dysfunctional and maladaptive perception. The therapeutic emphasis is on creating an experience of something new that will allow the client to become more fully and creatively alive and to experiment with new, healthier ways of thinking and being. For those of us interested in individualistic creative bibliotherapy’s role in the Health Humanities, we can apply this notion of a hermeneutics of experience to explain the bibliotherapeutic potential of reading literature about trauma more fully. In this paper I explore the experiential and experimental nature of several well-known novels in imagining varied embodied responses to trauma. These healing thought experiment responses can provide a universal therapeutic template for readers struggling to overcome the negative impact of their own experiences with trauma.