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This paper addresses the role of personal writing in processes involving writing, processing loss and grief, and identity consolidation, employed in shaping the character of Emily Starr in the book "Emily of New Moon" by Lucy Maud Montgomery, well known for her series "Anne of Green Gables" and for the character of Anne Shirley. Emily, who is dealing with orphanhood following the childhood loss of both parents in a short span of time, uses writing to vent her feelings when in distress and as a way of maintaining contact with her father who died, by writing to him. Later on, the possibility of renewing her emotional connection with her mother through an encounter with the room where she grew up and by writing to her, removes Emily from her state of existential loneliness and brings her closer to her true self, manifested in the creative and spontaneous elements within her. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical paper provides an experiential account of learning from self-help books by the teachers of the management stream from the Indian context. The current environment is posing new and unprecedented challenges to academicians, management teachers being one of them. Self-help books have for centuries helped readers to deal with such challenges. Hence, this exploratory study, using the narration method, has inquired through qualitative interviews with management teachers about their personal experiences of reading self-help books. The findings provided a broad understanding of how they learn, get inspiration, get the guidance, get healed and thus cope with the challenges in their life as a result of reading self-help books which may be extended to Poetry Therapy or unstructured Bibliotherapy in some ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This semester-long study attempted to investigate 122 (M: 21; F: 101) Taiwanese undergraduates' responses to bibliotherapy and two textbooks in an Advanced English Reading classroom. Data collection included an anonymous 6-point Likert scaled questionnaire with a space for free comments and the students' reflection papers to show their perceptions. The results of the study showed that bibliotherapy effectively helped the students (a) understand the importance of self-knowledge, life growth, emotion management, positive thinking, and behavior awareness, (b) understand the importance of (literature) reading, (literature) reading course, and the benefits of (literature) reading, and (c) enhance self-understanding, positive thinking, mental growth, and (positive) behavioral change. Moreover, the study found that the two textbooks could effectively boost the students' bibliotherapeutic energy, including their positive thinking ability, mental growth, and mature behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of this paper review the efficacy of poetry therapy and introduce a curriculum to be used in the provision of a co-facilitative poetry therapy group process which involves a professional poet and a therapist. Drawing upon best practices of poetry therapy, the paper demonstrates that this innovative approach not only contributes to the field but is transferable among a variety of client populations. The authors present a curriculum, writing exercises, samples of poems, and include a plan for efficacy assessment in the context of a domestic violence survival group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how reading and writing processes contribute to therapist supervision as a means of working through impasse situations and facilitating the development of the therapeutic self. Texts read and written during supervision will mediate resistance, blocked narratives and containment or attention issues, as well as difficulties in change and processing developments during therapy. Texts will serve as a platform to contain the unconscious and conscious realms and shall contain the professional intrapersonal processing of the supervisee, as well as therapist-patient transference and countertransference relations and supervision relations. For this purpose, three variations of supervision shall be presented, demonstrating the transformative power of reading and writing processes for supervision in impasse situations: (1) reading and writing the therapeutic hour's summaries as a means to gain a re-observation; (2) the text's contribution in removing the patient's identity barriers; (3) the text as a release container to expose the iceberg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper includes research into the pervasiveness and dangerousness of intimate partner violence and the ways that poetry therapy can be used to help victims gain perspective on their situation. According to the World Health Organization, over 30 percent of women worldwide have experienced violence at the hands of a partner. The author's personal experience with poetry therapy in leaving an abusive relationship of 13 years is used as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is suggesting a bibliotherapeutic reading of the virtual texts of Israeli blogger moms viaAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland, introducing the reader to the range of literary representations of the mother in Lewis Carroll’s well-known work and the real mother as a patient in the clinical context. Here, the maternal text emerges as a transitional object that allows mothers to cope with the existential paradoxes of their daily lives and experience their lives as meaningful, suggesting that the creative maternal experience is a transitional experience. Like Alice, the playing mothers’ developmental transition is in the form of a shift from daily life into the realm of fantasy and virtual fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper discusses the relations between tonal and atonal regions of the psychic space as being responsible for the relations between movement and stasis. Drawing on a musical terminology, I describe the constant tension between a harmonious pole of thinking and an idiosyncratic one, both in psychoanalytic meta-reflection as well as in the clinical realm, presenting thereby bibliotherapy, poetry therapy, and the poetic zones of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy as the therapeutic forces which “pull” toward the link to atonal psychic areas, enabling in that way the ongoing integration of the homely and un-homely, the syntax and the anti-syntax of the psychic space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The contribution of stories in biblio-poetry therapy practice and in enhancing personal development is the focus of this paper. Writing, telling and listening to stories open up possibilities for change and new learning windows. Through expressive and communicative stories, therapeutic and developmental dia- and polylogism can expand one's imaginative space and perspectives of action in a “holding framework” and even in virtual communities. Rewriting previous “truth stories” moves and modifies one's conceptions of self, others and life relations. The inhibitions, failures and dislocations inherent in storytelling also provide valuable experiential and experimental touching/moving knowledge. The presence of the “imagined reader” and the “internal supervisor” in the writing process can help in reflecting, evaluating and steering, through meta-emotional and metacognitive processes, one's own and others’ needs, aspirations and goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]