The therapeutic encounter
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Therapy and literature have a storied history, from the advent of psychoanalysis to the rise and fall of psychoanalytic literary criticism. Literary critics have debated the implications of therapeutic modes of narrating experience. They contend that by privileging individual psychology, therapy runs the risk of blinding individuals to the structural conditions that contribute to their mental distress, even as it might also develop therapeutic vernaculars that make people feel less alone. However, while studies have shown that certain literary genres can be therapeutic for specific readers, little work has explored how therapy influences literary form across genres and over the course of the 20th century. As a result, scholarship either measures how accurately literature represents a certain kind of therapy or maintains that a given genre is therapeutic for readers of specific classes and genders. Neither approach asks the deeper question: What does it mean—for literary history, contemporary theories of reading, and the mental health crisis—to argue for literature as a therapeutic endeavor? The Therapeutic Encounter remedies these gaps by situating the scene of analysis as both cause and effect: on the one hand, I show how historical sessions between analysts and analysands condition the creation of 20th-century literature. On the other, I demonstrate how 20th- and 21st-century literature creates the conditions of a therapeutic relationship with readers. In so doing, I reveal the often unexpected ways that therapy inflects literary form across genres, from diary and memoir to short story, novel, and play. The Therapeutic Encounter plumbs the paradoxical promise that dialogue, even if painful in the moment, reduces shared suffering in the long term. These dialogues can often lead us astray, whether we think too well of ourselves or shirk responsibility for making changes. Yet therapy is less terminable than interminable, not a one-stop cure but a reckoning: a salutary process of coming to understand ourselves in relation with others. Like therapy, reading literature can also be a process of learning to appreciate the conflicts and inconsistencies that arise when we discover we do not know ourselves as well as we tend to think we do.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Mukamal, Anna Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | McGurl, Mark, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | McGurl, Mark, 1966- |
| Thesis advisor | Bronstein, Michaela |
| Thesis advisor | Castle, Terry |
| Thesis advisor | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Degree committee member | Bronstein, Michaela |
| Degree committee member | Castle, Terry |
| Degree committee member | Jones, Gavin Roger, 1968- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, English Department |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Anna Mukamal. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the English Department. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/jq437nv8153 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Anna Elizabeth Mukamal
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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