Bibliotherapy and Schizophrenia: A Stanghellinian Perspective

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that has long been regarded as irreversibly degenerative. However, the recent improvements in treatment and prognosis and the trend towards person-centred care have reversed this fatalistic tendency, and encouraged the development of theoretical and clinical tools to support these people as closely as possible to their concerns.

In this article, we look at how bibliotherapy, namely care assisted by the reading of literary fictions, might be conceived in relation to the classic psychotherapeutic framework. To circumscribe the definition of this approach for people with schizophrenia, we will refer to the work of Giovanni Stanghellini, and in particular to two of his works: the Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Psychodynamics model, and his epistemological theory of Images. Thus, we shall see that the clinical particularities of bibliotherapy could assist a person-centred psychotherapy by promoting the unfolding of people's phenomenological experiences, opening them up to other ways of interpreting them, and re-establishing the dialogue between the self and its existence.

Bibliotherapy could hence participate in the contemporary movements of clinical hermeneutic phenomenology, medical humanities, and personal recovery.