Plotlines: Literature and Mental Health
Often in my master’s program, our professors had us introduce ourselves along with why we had chosen to pursue social work. The stock response, of course, was “I want to help people.” Well, yes, that was part of it for me too. But truthfully, I have always been a constant reader, and my passion for being a therapist comes from the same source. As a child I could spend whole afternoons lying on the floor, working my way from one cover of a book to the other. I find people and the plotlines that shape their lives just as mesmerizing. I became a social worker and ultimately a therapist because I love a good story.
Fact: I am happier when I read fiction. This is the kind of truth I forget and remember over and over again, as life seems to crowd out fiction reading: in cost-benefit terms, it seems like the emotional payoff will be higher from “actually doing something.” But when I finally pick up a new fiction book it’s a moment of head-smacking re-realization, oh yeah dummy, this is always great. What’s made me curious, too, is that even being in the process of reading a work of fiction buoys my mood. Far beyond the hours I spend with eyeballs pointed at the page, reading fiction does something to my brain that makes me happier and healthier as I go about the days.
A few of my favorites from the American Library Association’s celebrity reading posters. From left to right are Ani DiFranco, David Bowie, and Taylor Swift.
To help me understand what the difference was, I decided to pay attention this time. How does picking up a new book after a drought of reading fiction have such an impact on my mood? The book in play was Fledgling by Octavia Butler, in which an amnesiac vampire child named Shori must track down her family’s murderers. Juicy, right?
What I discovered is that reading fiction makes me feel like I’m somehow living extra life. It’s not exactly like I “become” Shori or I fully enter her world, like the pro-reading posters in the school library would have you believe. But I get a bonus, 125% of a life instead of the usual 100%. I am “Hannah Frankel” with all of her plotlines and quotidiana, but I also imagine and grasp Shori’s world more and more. This happens both when I’m actually reading it but also in little flickers throughout the day, when the story passes through my mind while I chop vegetables or wait in traffic. I think these flickers might be the key ingredient of what makes fiction so essentially nourishing for me.
READ IT
To get out of our own heads, with all their well-worn grooves and recursive loops, is an endemically human need. In order to help us understand this yearning and what its fulfillment looks like, humanist psychology describes a domain of specifically “self-transcendent” emotions. These emotional states expand our boundaries of self into a larger common identity shared with other humans and even in some cases with other non-human beings, up to and including nature or the cosmos itself. Awe, flow, admiration, and compassion are all self-transcendent emotions. I believe there is also a place for the darker side of the emotional spectrum: for the horror one feels at human cruelty, or the tragedy in watching something bitter befall someone who doesn’t deserve it.
Self-transcendent emotions are a growing area of research interest. In his final years Abraham Maslow added “self-transcendence” to his hierarchy of human needs, replacing self-actualization as the pinnacle. There is something sweet to me about this, an aging giant in his field realizing more than twenty years after he published a defining model that he got something wrong, something big, and perhaps something that only age could emphasize the importance of to him. Shortly after he began to write and conceptualize this idea, however, Maslow suffered a major heart attack. He never published widely about his revised pyramid before dying of another heart attack a few years later.
Maslow’s “new and improved” hierarchy of needs. Many renditions leave off his final addition of self-transcendence.
Through this lens I realize, literature is a familiar access point to a kind of casual, low-stakes self-transcendence. The best name for the emotion I feel when even thinking about a story I’m reading is “fascination,” which seems to me to be a quiet cousin of awe and flow. Perhaps it’s not as ecstatic as looking at the Grand Canyon or watching a mother give birth or whatnot, but it’s much more accessible on a day-to-day basis. My two go-to genres are classic literature and science fiction. Both involve peering into a different world, the world of the past or that of an alternate human present or future.
This kind of perspective, available on demand, is a vitamin. Experiencing self-transcendence is linked to a host of indicators of emotional and cognitive wellbeing, including lower rates of depression and loneliness and higher rates of purpose and meaning. I can personally vouch for these benefits. I feel less lonely and more a part of humanity when I’m reading fiction. Because I identify more with our human emotional heritage and struggles, I am more connected to the meaning and passion I feel in being of service to the people in my life, including my clients.
I finished Fledgling and put it down, a little dazed and dreamy, still in awe of the story. No narrator elucidates the incredible stories going on around us in the real world. We just see people (or perhaps vampires) living their lives as we go about the business of living ours. It’s something that I love about my work: the opportunity to marvel at how much is going on for every single person, the rich densely woven mesh of the stories that we stroll in and out of or simply in between. This is another level of self-transcendence that we gain access to through appreciating fiction. Through reading stories we remember, with a sense of awe, how real stories work so quietly and yet so magically around us all.