The Psychological Benefits of Reading Literature

In a prior article, I began a discussion about how reading literature with complex characters is beneficial to the brain.  In this article, I'll expand on this topic and discuss the potential emotional and psychological benefits of reading literature.

The Psychological Benefits of Reading Literature

Aside from the enjoyment and emotional comfort of reading literature, there can be considerable psychological benefits of reading well-written literature with complex characters.

Developing Psychological Insight
As I mentioned in my prior article, when we read about a character, especially a character that we identify with, who overcomes psychological issues, we can gain insight into our own personal struggles and, possibly, see aspects of our problems in new ways.

We can also gain psychological insight from the characters' missteps and identify with their emotional vulnerabilities.

Developing Empathy
In addition, when we're immersed in well written literature, we often feel empathetic towards the characters and this could help in developing empathy for ourselves and others.

Learning About Other Cultures and Historical Times
By reading about other cultures and historical times, it opens us up beyond our own circumscribed lives.

As they open up a new world for us, literature offers us the possibility of new ways of thinking and feeling.  Literature can also give us a perspective about how history affects us now.

Developing a Sense of Curiosity
Being exposed to new ways of thinking and feeling can help to develop a greater sense of curiosity and psychological-mindedness.

Seeing conflicts and emotional dilemmas in a new light can shed light on our own problems and challenge habitual ways of thinking.

There are many examples in literature that provide the psychological benefits that I've discussed above.

Let's take a look at two authors, who are famous for providing stories with psychological depth, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust.

Jane Austen's Books
From Jane Austen's books, including  Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion, Northanger Abbey, and Mansfield Park, we can learn about what it means to get to know yourself as you mature, and to realize that you might not be the person who you thought you were, and the people that you thought you knew can be quite different from who you thought they were.

Jane Austen's Historical Home

We learn how to take the perspective of seeing ourselves through someone else's eyes.

In Sense and Sensibility, two sisters, who have different ways of relating and responding to their worlds, learn from each other, over time, which helps each of them to gain self understanding as well as a new perspective about others.

There are many lessons to be learned from her books about family relationships and romantic relationships.

Austen also gives us guidance in how to live ethically under unethical or corrupt circumstances.

Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Let's look at some examples from another book that is considered a classic, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust:

As a young Frenchman, the protagonist falls in love with Albertine, whom he first sees at a beach resort called Balbec, which was modeled after the resort town of Cabourg in France.

In Search of Lost Time: Balbec (Cabourg, France)

Initially, he is obsessed with her and her friends and tries to find ways to meet them.

After he begins a relationship with Albertine and she moves in with him in Paris, he is torn with ambivalence as to whether he wants to remain in the relationship or he wants to end it.

While she is awake, he is tormented with jealousy and suspicion, and he wants to end it, but when she is asleep, all the love and tender feelings that he has for her arise in him again, and he wants to remain in the relationship.

As most people know from their own experiences, being in love often involves ambivalence as well as irrational behavior, including irrational jealousy where there is no objective reason to be jealous.

The protagonist wants Albertine to love him more, but how he goes about trying to increase her passion for him (by being dismissive and rejecting her) has the opposite effect.

Rather than serving to increase her passion, his emotional distance and rejecting nature serve only to alienate her and she eventually gets fed up and leaves him.

After she leaves, he realizes that he made a terrible mistake and, after a few false starts, he eventually writes to her offering to do anything to get her back.

The story goes on with many twists and turns.

Reading this part of the story, many people could identify with the protagonist's ambivalence and his irrational behavior, including believing that a "cold shoulder" towards a loved one would make the loved one even more passionate to pursue the relationship.

No doubt sometimes giving a lover a "cold shoulder" might work temporarily, but it often backfires in the end (if it works at all), as many people who do this realize when they're thinking more clearly.

In addition to the psychological insights about romantic relationships and friendships, Proust gives many other examples where people use psychological defense mechanisms, including denial, to cope with difficult situations.

As an example, Charles Swann, who is in love with Odette and wants to pursue a relationship with her, receives an anonymous warning letter about Odette's personal history of having many sexual affairs with rich. The letter also reveals that she worked as a sex worker.  At the time, during the Belle Epoque, this would have been scandalous and detrimental for Swann's reputation.

In Search of Lost Time: Swann In Love With Odette

Swann is intelligent and has a momentary insight that Odette is only interested in him for his money, but he is also somewhat naive.

With an unconscious gesture of wiping his glasses clean, which is a metaphor for his defense mechanism of not wanting to see, he ignores the warning signs. Instead, he pursues the relationship to his detriment.

Rather than giving a lengthy explanation about Swann's unconscious choice of ignoring his insights and the warning letter, Proust shows Swann making the a small unconscious gesture of wiping his glasses clean.  From this small unconscious gesture, the reader can see what Swann refuses to see the problems involved with this relationship.

Many people could identify with Charles Swann and remember times when they ignored internal and external warnings by pursuing a relationship fraught with problems because this is a common mistake that many people make when they fall in love.

As another example, many of the characters are either part of the aristocracy or part of the bourgeoisie in Paris.  Madame Verdurin, who is a bourgeois Bohemian hostess, has social gatherings with her "little clan" of acquaintances, including artists and musicians.

Proust, who is an astute observer of interpersonal relationships and who used composites of people that he knew in his book, provides us with a humorous description of Madame Verdurin, who outwardly professes a disdain for aristocrats by calling them "bores" and professing that she would never attend one of their social events.

Despite what she says, everything else about her, her gestures, her looks, her demeanor, says how much she really longs to be accepted by French aristocracy, who reject her early on in the story.

During that same time period, Sigmund Freud was writing about how unconscious thoughts manifest, despite what the conscious mind might believe.  Similarly, In Search of Lost Time, Proust gives us rich descriptions of the unconscious thoughts and motivations of his characters, including the narrator, Monsieur Swann and Madame Verdurin.

Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious Mind

Reading about the unconscious thoughts and motivations of the characters in the story, you can't help but recognize yourself and others, if not in exactly the same situation, then in other situations where denial was used as a psychological defense mechanism.

In Search of Lost Time is about many things, including an aspiring writer's struggle to develop confidence in himself and in his writing, how unconscious memories are aroused by certain sensory experiences, the passage of time, how people and places change over time, and how our perspective about life and relationships can also change over time.

While reading literature with complex characters, a reader can have psychological insights might come to the reader as epiphanies about him or herself.  

Other times, it will come as a recognition that the reader is similar to a character in the book. 

It might also come as a relief that these psychological phenomena are common to other people and not just to the reader.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website: Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

How Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I've always been a proponent of having children learn to read for pleasure early in their lives. I've always enjoyed reading from the time I was in the first grade.  My interest in reading was encouraged by my mother, who would read to me everyday when I was a young child, and who each week brought me to the library, a place that seemed magical and filled with possibilities to me.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on Your Brain

I was also fortunate to have a first grade teacher who recognized my love of reading and gave me beautifully illustrated books that were a little challenging for me at the time, like "Heidi" and "Pippi Longstockings," to inspire me to continue reading.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

Without the present day distractions of video games and the Internet, my imagination came alive and took flight as I read about characters who lived in places that were so different where I lived.  This also created a curiosity in me about people, customs and places outside of my immediate surroundings.

Reading and Brain Research
We now have research from neuroscience which reveals that brain scans taken while people read a detailed description, a metaphor or an emotional conversation between two characters in a story stimulate the brain.

The Broca's area and the Wernicke's area, among other areas of the brain, are parts of the brain that are involved in interpreting narratives.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

According to Annie Murphy Paul, a journalist who writes for the NY Times, the brain doesn't make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and actually living the experience.  She says that the same parts of the brain are stimulated.

This is similar to hypnotherapy, where the unconscious mind, including imagination, are engaged in a hypnotic state and the brain doesn't distinguish between the imagined images or metaphors and actual lived experience.  This is one of the reasons why clinical hypnosis is effective.

Reading Literature Has a Positive Effect on the Brain

As most people who love literature know, reading also gives us an opportunity to enter into the experience  of the protagonist, especially if it contains rich metaphors and descriptions and lively conversations between characters.

Entering into the protagonist's world, we can have an intimate emotional experience of his or her relationships, insights, doubts, fears, joys and sorrows.

By having this intimate emotional experience, we can't help to compare the protagonist's experience with our own.

It's often easier to develop psychological insights when the experiences are outside of ourselves, like, for instance, when we see a protagonist struggle and overcome a particular emotional dilemma, than it is when we're going through it ourselves.

In doing so, we can also develop insight into our own personal experiences, notice something that we've never thought of before or see an experience in a completely new light.

Good literature has a way of transporting us into new psychological states as well as new places in a way that reading nonfiction usually doesn't.

I'll continue this theme with specific examples in a future article.

About Me
I am a licensed New York City psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

Making Changes: What to Keep and What to Let Go of in Your Life - Part 1

Most of the articles in my psychotherapy blog are about making changes.  These include changes to our internal and external worlds as well as changes in our relationships.  Sometimes making these changes involve making choices about who or what to keep and what to let go of in our lives.

Making Changes:  What We Keep and What We Let Go of in Your Life

Change:  What We Keep and What We Let Go of in Your Life
Change isn't easy, especially when it involves the possibility of letting go of strongly held personal identities, people, places, beliefs and things that have had a profound effect on your life.

Even when you know it's for the best, letting go is hard.  Letting go can affect how you see yourself, how you see others as well as how others see you.

It can mean that you give up someone or something that was cherished for a long time, as when you  give up a way of being, a relationship that has become unhealthy for you or a home.

There are also different levels of knowing.

Often, knowing that change is necessary starts on a purely intellectual level.  At the same time, on an emotional level, you might want to pull back and stay with what's familiar rather than dealing with the unknown.

The deeper emotional knowing often comes over time as the heart and mind become aligned.

Elena Ferrante and Her Neapolitan Trilogy
Based on several recommendations, I recently began reading the Neapolitan trilogy by Elena Ferrante, including My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name and Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay.

As I read these books, I'm reminded, once again, of how much we can learn about ourselves and others from literature.

Over the course of the three books, the protagonist, Elena Greco, narrates her life story and her 60+ year relationship with her best friend, Lila Cerrulo, from the time when they were young girls growing up in a poor town just outside of Naples to their lives as women.  She takes us into the psychological worlds of these characters in a profound and gripping way.

Making Changes:  What We Keep and What We Let Go

There are many themes in Ms. Ferrante's books, including the changes that both characters make to overcome soul-crushing poverty.  These changes involve making difficult decisions as well as sacrifices.

As the narrator, Elena Greco, tells her tale, the reader is drawn in, sharing to this intimate story.

At the same time, the reader can reflect on his or her own life, similar experiences of friendship, family history, love, loss, fear, betrayal, trauma as well as a fierce determination to overcome personal obstacles.

Over the years, the intense friendship between Elena and Lila involves many instances of coming together and moving apart as they each struggle to make sense of their lives and the world around them.  Both of them are intelligent, perceptive and curious.  As children, Lila is the bolder one.

Then, through a combination of personal determination, luck, and outside intervention, one of them has an opportunity for higher education and the other chooses the path of an early marriage and financial stability.

Naples, Italy

There is irony and reversals of fortune along the way.  Efforts that seem long and fruitless bring unexpected surprises.  Efforts that appear to be a sure way out of misery lead to even greater misfortune.

Throughout the years, the two friends maintain a strong inner awareness of each other, even during times of estrangement.

Given how limited and impoverished their world is, both characters, as girls and later on as women, are courageous in the way they're willing to explore their inner world as well as the unknown world outside of their community.

For both characters, in different ways, this often involves going against the tide of long-held traditions, expectations, and community opinion in order to pursue their dreams.  Sometimes, it means risking it all and going it alone in a world where survival often depends on community. 

Ms. Ferrante, who also grew up in Naples, draws readers in with a compelling story and characters are well defined and true to life.  You can't help caring about them deeply as if they're people that you've known intimately all of your life.  And although the story takes place in Italy, Elena and Lila's struggles are universal, which is why I believe Ms. Ferrante has developed such a devoted following.

Not only do we feel that we know these characters--we actually do know them very well--they are each of us at one time or another in our lives. 

It is noteworthy that Ms. Ferrante's devoted following developed despite the fact that Ms. Ferrante (not her real name) remains somewhat of a mystery.

She doesn't do personal appearances to promote her books, nor does she do in-person interviews (her interviews are conducted via email).  She let her publishers know early on that, if there were going to be any prizes for the books, she would not be there in person to accept them.

As of this writing, she hasn't even divulged her real name.  So, her following is based solely on her beautiful writing, excellent reviews (see:  James Woods' review in the New Yorker magazine) and word of mouth among her fans.

Making Changes:  What We Keep and What We Let Go

While reading her books, I've come away with the impression that her stories might be personal, which could be one of the reasons why she prefers to remain anonymous.

Her stories are a reminder that even when change is for the better, it's often not so black or white because even positive changes often come with loss.

Whether it's a change in how we experience ourselves, a change in our close relationships or a change in the place that we call "home," there are often difficult choices to make.

What Does It Mean to "Let Go"?
What does it mean to "let go" of experiences that are deeply felt and have had a negative impact on us?

Certainly, it doesn't mean that we forget them.

The process of letting go of these experiences means letting go of the negative effect they have on us so that they're no longer running our lives, and we're no longer repeating destructive patterns because of these experiences.

If these experiences are particularly traumatic, part of the change, which is often made in psychotherapy, is working through these experiences so they no longer affect us in the present.

We Can Learn About Ourselves and Others Through Literature

I believe Ms. Ferrante's books are such excellent examples of many themes that I write about in my psychotherapy blog and discuss with my clients in my psychotherapy private practice in NYC that I'll continue this discussion in a future article.

Getting Help in Therapy

If you're struggling to make changes in your life, you're not alone.

Many people who have struggled like you have found it helpful to work with a licensed mental health professional to work on these changes in therapy.

Rather than struggling on your own, you could benefit from working with an experienced psychotherapist who can help you to overcome obstacles that keep you from leading a more fulfilling life.

About Me

I am a licensed NYC psychotherapist, hypnotherapist, EMDR and Somatic Experiencing therapist who works with individual adults and couples.

To find out more about me, visit my website:  Josephine Ferraro, LCSW - NYC Psychotherapist.

To set up a consultation, call me at (917) 742-2624 during business hours or email me.

See my article:  Making Changes: What to Keep and What to Let Go of in Your Life - Part 2