I libri che fanno la felicità

Psychotherapy meets literature: book therapy can heal illness in our psyche and increase our happiness.

English sample available

Rachele Bindu is a psychotherapist who uses examples drawn from literature to reflect on the principal needs of our psyche. She teaches people to read in a book therapy way, in other words to find themselves in books. Do we want to slow down our hectic lives? Let’s read Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Dino Buzzati. Would we like to feel more comfortable being on our own? Then we can’t not read Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Harper Lee and Kazuo Ishiguro. Who better than Donna Tartt, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Khalil Gibran and Oscar Wilde to learn to appreciate beauty? Then there are books for learning to take care of others, accept our own bodies and the precariousness of life, and believe in ourselves. After all, each one of us is made up of stories: we need fictional material created by others so that we can have a springboard, new words, new possibilities to tell our own story and face events that haven’t happened yet and may never happen in real life; but giving them serious thought enriches our psyche and helps us – why not? – to find happiness.