Rethinking Therapeutic Reading

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Kelda Green. Rethinking Therapeutic Reading

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Rethinking Therapeutic Reading

Lessons from Seneca, Montaigne, Wordsworth and George Eliot

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Stop now, father, stop, draw back your hand. Give way, my valour, endure my father’s command. This labour must be added to the Herculean labours: to live. Theseus raise up my father’s body, collapsed on the ground. My crime-stained hands shun contact with the one I love.22

As Hercules repeatedly calls for death to ‘stop’, the trajectory of the tragedy turns from death back towards life. The parts of Hercules that allowed him to be heroic are called into action again, but now the monster that he must slay is a psychological one. What is crucial is this shifting internal chemistry that turned a man from hero to crazed murderer: both are made of the same elemental ingredients. After the tragedy, the struggle is now to regain some version of that first formulation that allowed Hercules to survive unbearable situations. It is impossible to go backwards and retrieve an unstained version of his self: he must find a second copy of that first self and apply it now to the essential labour of living. Keeping himself alive after the tragedy will be the hardest labour of all for Hercules. Rather than a single act of strength or valour, it is a task which will demand a continuous, extended exertion of will, for while destruction can be done in a flash, survival is a long, drawn-out process.

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