Reading as Evocation: Engaging the Novel in Phenomenological Psychology

Abstract

Literary fiction gives us a window into ourselves and into those who may seem most unfamiliar to us. We therefore have a moral imperative to read, just as, as psychotherapists, we have a moral imperative to listen. Literary study teaches us to read closely, to listen for structure as well as content, and it also instructs us about different ways of paying attention. Inversely, because the practice of psychotherapy values connection and process, rather than simply interpretation, it shows us how we can bring ourselves more fully to literature. In this paper I propose ways of engaging the field of phenomenological psychology in this dialectical relationship of literature and psychotherapy. By using as a case study a recent experience of teaching Aimee Bender's (2000) novel An Invisible Sign of My Own in an interdisciplinary seminar on literature and psychology, I illustrate how literature and clinical discourses can inform and challenge each other as we seek to understand the meaning and lived experience of neuroses. I argue that the very act of reading can give the reader the sense and structure of experience that, if explored in a dialogal context, helps us gain access to phenomena that is neither simply self-generated nor simply observed in the other. I term this access evocation: A response that is a calling forth of the reader's own lived experiencing. I have long been fascinated by how psychotherapists tell the story of their experience of sitting with their first client and how this story changes over time. This fascination is borne out of my own experience and my own recounting. My first client, 'Richard', has appeared in several conference talks, graduate class lectures, and in even more conversations with other psychotherapists. Although I like to believe that I have not appropriated the experience of our work together to highlight some misguided fantasy about my precocious therapeutic skills, I fear that too often I have been the protagonist (though certainly not the hero) of such stories. After giving Richard's case study (narrating a childhood of physical and emotional abuse, and a variety of diagnoses ranging from schizophrenia to schizoaffective disorder to Asperger's syndrome, and a wide array of psycho-tropic drugs), I have then focused on myself. How difficult it was to sit with this extremely isolated man. How anxious I became every week during the hour leading up to his appointment time. How I read and re-read his two-inch thick case file and tried to map out a plan for our sessions, almost as if I were preparing to teach a class. How I tried to engage him in conversation and was met with what felt like one of five pre-recorded responses from him. How, even though over time he began to show me himself (how he hit himself in the face when he felt bad and how the beginning of a smile in his eyes looked), I wondered if I ever really learned how to keep him company. Maybe, at best, we sat together in a very mutual loneliness. Once again I am telling another story about Richard, about Richard and me. This time the story was prompted by a question one of my colleagues (who The Indo-Pacifi c Journal of Phenomenology (IPJP) is a joint project of the Humanities Faculty of the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and Edith Cowan University's Faculty of Regional Professional Studies (Australia) and published in association with NISC (Pty) Ltd. The IPJP is available online at www.ipjp.org. This work is licensed to the publisher under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence 3.0.