The Day We Were Dogs: Mental Vulnerability, Shared Reading, and Moments of Transformation

Abstract

This article builds on ethnographic fieldwork in shared reading groups for mentally vulnerable young people in Denmark. Shared reading is a technique in which prose and poetry are read aloud with breaks, allowing time for discussion. It is increasingly used in Denmark for mental health improvement. In our analysis, we employ Louise Rosenblatt's notion of the poem as event and the concept of Stimmung coined by the literary scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Drawing on detailed examples from reading group sessions and interviews, we show how participants tuned into an atmosphere of presence that arose from the collective engagement in a literary text. Such moments of presence were significant events for the participants, whose everyday lives otherwise were marked by mental illness and a sense of being different from others. The transformation on which this article focuses relates to the brief disappearance of the troubling sense of self with which the young people had to contend daily.