Bibliotherapy: a therapeutic proposal in the social tear

Abstract

From a holistic, integrative and psychoanalytic perspective, I understand that the library intervention belongs to the field of mental, physical, spiritual, ecological, and emotional health. It is offered as a therapeutic discipline focused on the accompaniment of the processes linked to vital crises, grief, demotivation, and very particular states of mind derived from what currently psychology professionals refer to as the binomial «depression-anxiety-covid». In this sense, the subject who is shipwrecked in the pure present of dissatisfaction, anger and threat finds in the dialogue with the librarian the possibility of changing automatic thinking through healthy confrontations. For this, the reading of a literary text can be the trigger for his bionarration, and thus, bibliotherapy operates as a binding power, a symbolic bridge between the sufferer and his circumstance. In the present communication ―focused on the effects of the pandemic and the «break» of the social skin, as a metaphor for isolation― bibliotherapy seeks to promote critical thinking from the interplay of interdisciplinary theoretical models. In addition, a specific experience is shared, developed with the format of a workshop for reading fictional texts about «the plague», and the rewriting of the personal script as a way to recover blocked subjective spaces.