When it comes to proposing a prescription, personal change books that are far from literature come into play. If we leave aside the psycho-political side of these publications, unlike literature, they provide a uniform material, a uniform route, a uniform awareness. However, we are as different as our fingerprints.
“Where there is movement, there is light, and where there is light, there is inevitably shadow. Although life is possible with light, the meaning of life remains hidden in the shadows.
You see the stillborn children of time in the shadows. Words, silences, songs, laments, oaths, betrayals, laughter, tears, joys, disappointments and faces. Mostly faces. You know what I'm talking about. All loves turn to ashes, all fathers die, all stories end.
Someone has to keep watch over the ruins; That's why all the children grow up, except one. A person who loses his shadow becomes the shadow himself.”*
One of the most popular questions about the relationship between literature and psychology is “whether life changes when you read a book”. This is something that is both very possible and very difficult to experience. What is possible is that a good literature reader will be shaken by a book he reads at some point in his life and that the book will directly influence his life. The difficult part is that a person is aware enough to allow what he reads to touch his life, strong enough to handle the confrontation, and ready enough to mark where the book touches his life. I know from my own experience that after reading dozens of classic or contemporary books, a paragraph I came across in a psychoabsurd novel I read at one point in my life (*Alper Canıgüz - The Flower of Hell) changed my life, if not radically, then at the sharpest point. When I think about the reason for this now, I see that the comments of the book activated dozens of things that were hidden in me, and the sentences in this book coincided with the "things" in me, just like the key that opens the lock easily in one fell swoop. There is a high probability that you have had this experience at some point in your life. This experience may have had a positive or negative impact on you. While it may “heal” you, it may also shake and shatter you. Therefore, how literature can heal someone depends on the age and time. It depends on knowledge, ego strength, awareness, attention and care.
Our belief that literature can heal us spiritually is not a superstition. There is an approach in the field of mental health called "bibliotherapy", which is slowly gaining representatives in our country. These studies aim to reach the inner world of the person and have a therapeutic effect there, through readings done individually or in groups. Sometimes a biography and sometimes a fiction can be used for this. My question is this: Do people experience a common immersive effect in these texts? It is known that some books can create effects in the brain associated with positive emotions, just like psychotherapy does in the mind.
But still, it is unlikely that there is a prescription that fits everyone, just like psychotherapy. When it comes to proposing a prescription, personal change books that are far from literature come into play. If we leave aside the psycho-political side of these publications, unlike literature, they provide a uniform material, a uniform route, a uniform awareness. However, we are as different as our fingerprints. We go through completely different stories, collect various moments and try to find our own way. Of course, we have both universal and culture-specific tastes, desires, and expectations. But we learn more from literature than the sentences of famous writers and poets that are shared tiresomely on social media. At least I hope so.
There are some of you who define morality, rebellion, retreat and weaknesses by making Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground a reference book. There are those who build the covers, corridors, wells and castles of life by reading Orhan Pamuk. There are also those who read Marquez and enjoy the feast of every color, repetition and interconnectedness of life. There will be some who avoid reading Bukowski, George Perec, Hakan Gündayı and Sadık Hidayet, and therefore reject the harsh, shameless and rebelliousness that can penetrate their bones. Some people will read only poetry at some point in their life. Because he needs to symbolize the separation, love and transcendence that he cannot bear. Not every book is good for people in every age. When you read the same book, you identify with the hero of the book and are impressed with it, and when you read it again, you are impressed with the anti-hero. I� This often depends on the psychodynamics that have a chance to rise to the surface of the iceberg. There is also the possibility that a book will poke deep within the unconscious material. If you're lucky, you'll have the chance to interpret these profound effects on a blog, in a reading group, or in your therapist's office. Otherwise, when you close the cover of the book in your hands, you may experience unexpected uneasiness. After all, literature can not only instill hope, open horizons, or heal wounds. Literature is sometimes as pugnacious as an ignored child. He wants to see it, feel it and perceive it. Every truth that you avoid in your daily routine may confront you disguised as fiction. They don't say "be careful, there are books" for nothing. That's why literature is frightening for the masses who have turned a blind eye and submitted to it. When we read George Orwell's 1984 or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, we come face to face with the fact that what is called dystopia is actually the system we live in. Because fiction is not actually the killer of reality, but the representation of what is most crucial about reality. Perhaps it is possible for a person to find himself in the fictional through his playful nature. He can twist the truth in this way. He captures from the words of the writer and the poet what is normally beyond the limits of his mind and soul. He senses how changeable reality is in a novel's hero, a poem's image, an innocent semicolon. At these points, change that leads to treatment becomes possible for a person.
A person finds a new reality in a fiction other than his own reality.
We learn from literature that another perspective, feeling, and world is possible. In fact, the author or poet has no intention of teaching us, guiding us or healing us. Although we know that many important writers and poets trumpet on behalf of some regimes, palaces and dictators. But we do not wish for literature to be a guide. We want literature to be something that mixes with us, flows with us and drags us into ourselves. Indeed, literature creates a feeling of inclusion and protection in its readers. I know people who do not share with anyone the rare books they have read that are not “best sellers.” Some people can also share what they read and comment on through social media, and join reading groups and literature clubs like us. It can produce and reproduce with its own cells. Everyone experiences literature in the way that is good for them. Maybe this is what the writer and poet want. Laying out colorful fabric meter by meter in front of the reader and expecting him to sew a haute couture garment. I'm not sure whether art is for art's sake or for society, but the aspects of literature that do not fit any mold and the aspects that fit individuality like a pattern are about love. Let's pay more attention to the passages from the books that we still remember even after half a century, our bedside books, and the poems we know by heart. Among them, there may be the one that suits our wound or the one that will be a balm for our wound. Because literature is compassionate as it is born and gives birth.
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