Bibliotherapy and Schizophrenia: a Stanghellinian Perspective

Background: Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that has long been regarded as irreversibly degener-ative. However, the recent improvements in treatment and prognosis, and the trend towards person-centred care has reversed this fatalistic tendency, and encouraged the development of theoretical and clinical tools to support these people as closely as possible to their concerns. Summary: In this article, we look at how bibliotherapy, namely care assisted by the reading of literary fictions, might be con-ceived in relation to the classic psychotherapeutic framework. To circumscribe the definition of this approach for people with schizophrenia, we will refer to the work of Giovanni Stanghellini, and in par-ticular to two of his works: the Phenomenology, Hermeneutics and Psychodynamics model, and his epis-temological theory of Images. Thus, we shall see that the clinical particularities of bibliotherapy could assist a person-centered psychotherapy by promoting the unfolding of people's phenomenological ex-periences, opening them up to other ways of interpreting them, and re-establishing the dialogue be-tween the self and its existence. Key messages: Bibliotherapy could hence participate in the contempo-rary movements of clinical hermeneutic phenomenology, medical humanities and experiential recovery.