Herman Hesse's MY BELIEF

 from My Belief

 “It must be emphasized that no one of us need belong permanently to any one of these types.”

The Naive Reader "This kind of reader assumes in an uncomplicated way that a book is there simply and solely to be read faithfully and attentively and to be judged according to its content or its form."

 "Everyone reads naïvely at times. This reader consumes a book as one consumes food, he eats and drinks to satiety, he is simply a taker, be he a boy with a book about Indians, a servant girl with a novel about countesses, or a student with Schopenhauer. This kind of reader is not related to a book as one person is to another but rather as a horse to his manager or perhaps as a horse to his driver: the book leads, the reader follows. The substance is taken objectively, accepted as reality. But the substance is only one consideration! There are also highly educated, very refined readers, especially of belles letters, who belong entirely to the class of the naïve… What the material, setting, and action are to simple souls, the art, language education, and intellectuality of the writer are to these cultivated readers."

 The Imaginative Reader who comes closest to perceiving the writer's intention.

"This reader treasures neither the substance nor the form of a book as its single most important value. He knows, in the way children know, that every object can have ten or a hundred meanings for the mind. He can, for example, watch a poet or philosopher struggling to persuade himself and this reader of his interpretation and evaluation of things, and he can smile because he sees in the apparent choice and freedom of the poet simply compulsion and passivity. This reader is already so far advanced that he knows what professors of literature and literary critics are mostly completely ignorant of: the there is no such thing as a free choice of material or form. ...For this reader follows the poet not the way a horse obeys his driver but the way a hunter follows his prey, and a glimpse suddenly gained into what lies beyond the apparent freedom of the poet, into the poet’s compulsion and passivity, can enchant him more than all the elegance of good technique and cultivated style.

The Associative Reader who "has known for a long time that for each truth the opposite also is true. He has known for a long time that every intellectual point of view is a pole to which an equally valid antipole exists"

This third and last type of reader "… is apparently the exact reverse of what is generally called a “good” reader. He is so completely an individual, so very much himself, that he confronts his reading matter with complete freedom. He wishes neither to educate nor to entertain himself, he uses a book exactly like any other object in the world, for him it is simply a point of departure and a stimulus. Essentially it makes no difference to him what he reads. He does not need a philosopher in order to learn from him, to adopt his teaching, or to attack or criticize him. He does not read a poet to accept his interpretation of the world; he interprets it for himself. He is, if you like, completely a child. He plays with everything — and from one point of view there is nothing more fruitful and rewarding than to play with everything. If this reader finds a beautiful sentence in a book, a truth, a word of wisdom, he begins by experimentally turning it upside down.

"This reader is able, or rather each one of us is able, at the hour in which he is at this stage, to read whatever he likes, a novel or grammar, a railroad timetable, a galley proof from the printer. At the hour when our imagination and our ability to associate are at their height, we really no longer read what is printed on the paper but swim in a stream of impulses and inspirations that reach us from what we are reading. They may come out of the text, they may simply emerge from the type face. An advertisement in a newspaper can become a revelation; the most exhilarating, the most affirmative thoughts can spring from a completely irrelevant word if one turns it about, playing with its letters as with a jigsaw puzzle. In this stage one can read the story of Little Read Riding Hood as a cosmogony or philosophy, or as a flowery erotic poem. Or one can read the label “Colorado maduro” on a box of cigars, play with the words, letters, and sounds, and thereby take a tour through the hundred kingdoms of knowledge, memory, and thought.

" Whoever remained permanently at this stage would not read any more, but no one does remain permanently at this stage. But whoever is not acquainted with this stage is a poor, an immature reader. He does not know that all the poetry and all the philosophy in the world lie within him too, that the greatest poet drew from no other source than the one each of us has within his own being. For just once in your life remain for an hour, a day at the third stage, the stage of not-reading-any-more. You will thereafter (it’s so easy to slip back) be that much better a reader, that much better a listener and interpreter of everything written. Stand just once at the stage where the stone by the road means as much to you as Goethe and Tolstoy, you will thereafter gain from Goethe, Tolstoy, and all poets infinitely more value, more sap and honey, more affirmation of life and of yourself than ever before. For the works of Goethe are not Goethe and the volumes of Dostoevsky are not Dostoevsky, they are only an attempt, a dubious and never successful attempt, to conjure up the many-voiced multitudinous world of which he was the central point.

"The third stage at which you are most yourself will put an end to your reading, will dissolve poetry, will dissolve art, will dissolve world history. And yet unless you intuitively know this stage, you will never read any book, any science or art except as a schoolboy reads his grammar."

~MY BELIEF 

 

"You were made to be yourselves. You were made to enrich the world with a sound, a tone, a shadow."

 from Letter to a Young German written to a dispirited youth in 1919 and later included in his 1946 anthology If the War Goes On… (public library), published the year he received the Nobel Prize

Reading as prevention

 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/reading-and-associations-with-brain-health-cognition-wellbeing-and-mental-health/1A3565FA61831A975813113DE1AB2B09

 

Abstract

Growing recognition of the importance of prevention in mental health has led to increased interest in modifiable lifestyle factors that support brain health, cognition, and well-being. This editorial examines evidence for an accessible and low-cost protective factor across the lifespan, namely reading for pleasure. Drawing on subjective surveys and objective studies using longitudinal, neuroimaging, and behavioral methods, we highlight converging findings that link reading engagement with improved brain and mental health, better cognitive performance, and reduced risk of cognitive decline. Survey data in adults suggested that reading was associated with reduced stress, greater empathy, enhanced well-being, and decreased loneliness. Longitudinal cohort studies further indicate that cognitively stimulating activities, particularly reading, are associated with a lower risk of dementia and slower cognitive decline, even among individuals with lower educational attainment. In childhood and adolescence, early reading for pleasure has been linked to better attention, memory, executive function, academic achievement, and fewer mental health problems. Neuroimaging findings suggest that reading is associated with structural and functional differences in brain regions supporting executive control, emotional regulation, and social cognition. Importantly, these benefits appear independent of socioeconomic background. Book club studies may suggest additional social benefits of reading in groups. Together, the evidence supports reading for pleasure and engaging in book clubs as scalable interventions, which may promote cognitive reserve, resilience, and lifelong mental well-being.

Reading and its cognitive benefits

 https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/why-reading-pleasure-so-vital-brain-2026a10012r9

 

"Scientists have long recognized that getting lost in a page-turner can reap cognitive benefits far beyond the thrill of the chapter. Now, a growing body of research is bringing them closer to understanding why, as shown by a new review in Psychological Medicine.

"In children and teens, reading is linked to improved attention, executive function, and mental health. In adults, it helps lower stress and loneliness and increase empathy and cognitive function. Reading for pleasure, the authors said, is “an accessible and low-cost protective factor across the lifespan” that can serve as a scalable intervention."

Something to note:

"Audiobooks haven’t been shown to provide the same attention-related benefits."

Sheri S. Tepper

I've read many of her books over the years. Her feminist scifi covers ground that flies somewhat under the radar. The Gate to Women's Country is probably her best known work, partly because of a failing on the part of the author to consider the relevance and importance of non-binary individuals. However, all of her novels offer a unique perspective on the status of women. 

I'm just finishing her Gibbon's Decline and Fall and am finally including her here as a writer who must be read to understand how disenfranchised women are from power systems embedded in our patriarchal society. Somewhat less dystopian than Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, Tepper offers perspective on the world we think we know and asks us to question not only how we got here but where we go from here.

Some quotes:

(Keeping in mind the novel was published in 1996.) 

 

"We've taken over the KKK, and the American Nazi party, but they're only pocket change. We now own the Republican party. Any moderates still hiding in there have been flushed out. We've been managing the press for over 20 years now, and the public is accustomed to our view of the world. ...

 

"People don't want to absorb new information. They like predictability.

 

"...And then, of course, people are sick of issues. Civil rights, human rights, women's rights--people are tired of all that." 

 

"Politics has nothing to do with reality."

 

"The battle that's coming...is between balance and dominion."

 

"...there is hope in 2 women, help in 3 women, strength in 4, joy in 5, power in 6, and against 7, no gate may stand."  (I especially like this one; the underlining is my own.)

 

 "...The battle coming that was coming...has nothing to do with gender but with dominion."

Reading as Developmental Pathway

Presented in full. Open Source.

Front. Public Health, 11 October 2026

Sec. Public Mental Health

Volume 14 - 2026 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2026.1982716

From shared reading to self-narration: a developmental pathway for reading-based psychological support

• Mengjing Zhao ¹

• YZ Yishu Zhang

Abstract

Reading-based psychological support is usually studied as clinical bibliotherapy, shared reading, or literacy-related intervention, and these strands are rarely followed across childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. This perspective asks whether shared reading can become a source of self-narration. In childhood, reading with a responsive adult may support emotional language and meaning-making. During adolescence, some narrative resources may be selectively taken up and revised. In emerging adulthood, they may be used to organize transitions, commitments, and possible futures into an evolving life story. The account presents this as a developmental hypothesis rather than as evidence that childhood reading causes later narrative identity. Reading is treated as a complement to mental-health treatment, not as a substitute. The result is a set of empirical questions about mediation, developmental timing, relational quality, and contextual confounding.

1 Introduction

Reading-based psychological support appears in two largely separate literatures. Clinical bibliotherapy uses selected books to support symptom management, cognitive change, or self-guided psychological treatment (, ). In developmental and educational settings, shared reading is associated with language development, emotion understanding, and social interaction (). The two strands are seldom considered within one developmental account, so reading tends to be framed as an age-specific intervention, a literacy practice, or a group activity rather than as a psychological resource whose function changes over time.

Reading-based psychological support is used here as an umbrella term covering these strands, not as a synonym for bibliotherapy. Clinical bibliotherapy usually begins with a psychological difficulty, developmental shared reading concerns ordinary social–emotional growth, and literacy interventions primarily target language and reading skills. What the strands share is reading encounters that help people interpret emotion, relationships, and personal change. Narrative identity is a related but distinct construct, an evolving life story that organizes past experience, present commitments, and anticipated futures (). The argument treats reading as a possible developmental input to narrative identity, a question separate from using narrative identity as a clinical outcome.

Existing evidence does not show that childhood shared reading causes a more coherent narrative identity in emerging adulthood. Findings from adjacent literatures instead support a testable account in which relationally supported reading supplies emotional and narrative resources that may be internalized and later used during self-authorship. Three transitions organize the account: relational scaffolding in childhood, narrative internalization across adolescence, and self-narration during emerging adulthood.

The model builds on process accounts of narrative self-development (, ) by asking whether the text-mediated, revisitable object in shared reading adds a distinctive developmental input beyond situated storytelling and autobiographical reasoning. The contribution is to specify when and how reading may become one source of narrative material within a broader social-developmental system.

The account is compatible with clinical bibliotherapy, dialogic reading, narrative identity research, and community shared-reading practice without merging them into one intervention. Reading is not a substitute for assessment, psychotherapy, or medication; the preventive question is whether reading environments contribute to psychological resources before, between, or alongside formal treatment.

2 From reading as intervention to reading as developmental resource

Bibliotherapy has long carried a tension between treatment and growth. Clinical approaches begin with a defined difficulty and select material for a target population. Developmental bibliotherapy uses stories and discussion to support ordinary emotional development, especially in schools and families. Its evidence base now includes recent work on digitally mediated bibliotherapy ().

This distinction matters because a child does not encounter a story as an isolated reader. An adult selects the material, regulates the pace, explains unfamiliar experiences, notices the child’s emotional response, and connects the story to the child’s life. The book is therefore embedded in a relational event. Dialogic-reading research has primarily measured the linguistic consequences of this event, but the same interaction may also provide emotional and interpretive scaffolding (, ). Questions such as “Why do you think the character did that?” or “Have you ever felt like this?” invite the child to connect narrative events with mental states and personal experience.

Shared reading is more than exposure to positive messages. The child encounters an organized representation of experience, an adult helps interpret it, and the child acquires ways to talk about feelings, relationships, conflict, and change. The process resembles parent–child reminiscing but has a different structure: reminiscing organizes first-person past events, whereas shared reading offers a revisitable third-person or symbolic world. A character can provide psychological distance while the book remains a stable object for joint attention. Three features distinguish reading from other narrative activities: a text stays available for return, so the same episode can be reinterpreted later; its symbolic world allows emotional material to be approached without direct self-disclosure; and it is portable into settings where no interlocutor is present. Oral storytelling and therapeutic dialogue share the second feature only in part, and film offers the symbolic world without the reader’s control over pace and return. Whether these features produce distinct developmental effects is an empirical question, addressed in Prediction 4. Research on elaborative reminiscing (, ) provides an analogue for the claim, not direct evidence that shared reading produces the same outcomes.

Across development, the proposed exposure changes form while retaining a common functional core: access to a revisitable narrative object, plus opportunities to interpret it with others and, later, in dialogue with others. The model does not treat childhood co-reading as a stable cause in itself. Early interpretive support may instead contribute to later competencies that are repeatedly revised through adolescents’ own reading, peer and family conversations, and other narrative practices.

3 Three developmental transitions

Evidence for the three transitions is uneven. The link from shared reading to language and social–emotional outcomes in childhood rests on replicated findings; the connection between adolescent reading and documented developmental processes is not yet established; and the link from childhood reading to emerging-adult narrative identity remains theoretical. Each subsection states which level applies, and Table 1 carries the same labels.

 

3.1 Childhood: shared reading as relational scaffolding

In childhood, the primary psychological resource may be the relationship organized around the text. Shared reading creates a bounded situation in which an adult and child attend to the same symbolic world. The child can approach difficult emotions indirectly through a character, while the adult can respond without requiring the child to disclose a personal problem directly. This distance can make emotional exploration more tolerable than direct questioning.

The adult’s role goes beyond explaining the correct lesson. A supportive adult can validate ambiguity, invite several interpretations, and connect the story to the child’s experience without forcing disclosure. Repeated interactions may teach the child that inner states can be named, discussed, and placed within a sequence of events. These are early components of psychological meaning-making, still far from a mature narrative identity, but they may create conditions in which later self-narration becomes easier.

Evidence in childhood is strongest for proximal outcomes: language, parent–child interaction, emotion talk, and aspects of social–emotional development (, , ). Reading-based interventions have also been associated with emotion processing in children exposed to early adversity (). A recent systematic review suggests that early reading promotion may affect parent–child relational and health-promoting processes, although effects remain heterogeneous (). Some longitudinal studies associate childhood reading for pleasure with later health-related behaviors, but these associations do not establish a developmental mechanism (). Evidence for long-term identity outcomes is much thinner, and childhood shared reading is treated here as a possible foundation rather than a completed therapeutic process.

3.2 Adolescence: from external stories to internalized narrative resources

Adolescence is a plausible transition point because the capacity to organize events into a temporally and causally coherent life story develops during this period. Research on autobiographical reasoning and family narrative co-construction suggests that adolescents increasingly interpret personal events through themes such as agency, continuity, belonging, and change (, ). Longitudinal work indicates both stability and developmental change in autobiographical reasoning across this period (). Adolescents also encounter narratives through novels, biographies, and other media; the account treats these non-reading narratives as competing or complementary contexts rather than as evidence for a reading-specific effect.

Reading may widen the range of situations and identities available for reflection. Fiction rarely offers a direct script for living; it can provide models of conflict, attachment, loss, moral choice, and transformation that readers compare with their own experience and accept, reject, or revise. Internalization is selective appropriation, not passive absorption.

Internalization is observable at three levels. At the level of content, readers spontaneously use story-derived themes, metaphors, or contrasts when describing their own experience; at the level of structure, personal narratives show greater temporal, causal, and thematic coherence; and at the level of language, descriptions of self and others contain more emotion and mental-state terms. These indicators can be scored from life-story interviews and from linguistic coding of narrative text.

The transition changes the form of the resource rather than the target of the theory. The childhood input is relationally organized reading, the adolescent process is selective appropriation and comparison, and the emerging-adult outcome is the use of narrative resources in self-interpretation. Reading-specificity becomes a testable hypothesis when the relevant comparison is interpretive reading against equally responsive non-reading narrative interaction.

The relational mechanism changes during adolescence but does not disappear. Reading may become more solitary, while interpretations continue to be shaped in classrooms, peer groups, families, online communities, and therapeutic conversations. The shift is from overt co-reading toward an internalized dialogue that remains open to social revision.

Replication findings on fiction reading, empathy, and theory of mind are mixed (, ), and associations between reading and well-being may reflect family resources, education, personality, and prior mental health. Reading does not automatically improve social cognition or produce a coherent self. The claim is narrower: reading supplies symbolic material that may become useful when combined with reflection, discussion, and developmental readiness.

Three intermediate processes deserve distinction. Autobiographical reasoning is the capacity to draw temporal, causal, and thematic links among personal events. Narrative engagement is sustained interpretive involvement with a story, including attention to characters’ goals, conflicts, and possible meanings; it is not equivalent to reading frequency or passive exposure. Emotionally meaningful interpretive language is the ability to name and discuss feelings, intentions, relationships, and change in ways connected to personal experience. The processes overlap, but each does distinct work: autobiographical organization, engagement with narrative material, and the language available for interpretation.

The three processes occupy the mediator position, between relational reading experiences and narrative identity. Self-narration names the ongoing process of telling, and narrative identity names the structured product it yields, which serves as the outcome. Autobiographical reasoning, narrative engagement, and interpretive language are the intermediate processes through which earlier reading is expected to affect that outcome.

Each construct can be operationalized with existing instruments. Narrative identity is assessed with the life-story interview and scored for the Big Three themes of agency, communion, and redemption (). Autobiographical reasoning is scored from turning-point narratives for meaning-making () and from narrative coherence ratings (). Reading motivation and the amount and breadth of reading can be indexed with the Motivation for Reading Questionnaire (), which serves as a behavioral proxy for narrative engagement, and emotionally meaningful interpretive language is indexed by emotion and mental-state vocabulary.

3.3 Emerging adulthood: self-narration and life authorship

Emerging adulthood is characterized by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, a sense of being between stages, and heightened perceived possibilities (). These features create a demand for self-interpretation. Individuals must make choices about education, work, relationships, values, and future direction while many social roles remain unsettled.

Narrative identity theory describes emerging adulthood as a period in which individuals increasingly author their own life stories (, ). Recent longitudinal research has connected narrative identity development from adolescence into emerging adulthood with well-being (), while longer-term work has linked narrative features to trajectories of depression and well-being beyond personality traits (). Self-narration here does not mean producing a polished autobiography; it is the ongoing organization of remembered events, present commitments, and imagined futures into a personally meaningful account. Literary and biographical texts may contribute concepts, contrasts, metaphors, and possible selves for interpreting these transitions.

Shared reading can make meaning-making relationally available in childhood. Adolescence may expand the capacity to compare and internalize narrative resources. Emerging adulthood increases the need to use such resources while making choices and interpreting change. The sequence is not universal or linear: some people develop self-narrative through family stories, religion, peer relationships, media, or creative practice rather than reading.

4 The proposed developmental pathway

Figure 1 summarizes the proposed sequence. In childhood, children encounter stories within supportive relationships, most often through shared reading, oral storytelling, or guided discussion, and adults or peers connect narrative events with emotions, intentions, and personal experience. Across later childhood and adolescence, some stories and interpretive patterns may be internalized as symbolic resources for autobiographical reasoning. By emerging adulthood, individuals may draw on them to make sense of transitions, conflicts, commitments, and possible futures.

 

The arrows in Figure 1 are hypotheses rather than established causal effects, and the four predictions are summarized in Table 1. The first asks whether interpretive shared reading explains additional variance in later autobiographical reasoning once baseline language, parental education, family reading climate, relationship quality, and elaborative reminiscing are accounted for. The second asks whether autobiographical reasoning temporally mediates the association between earlier relational reading and emerging-adult narrative identity. The third distinguishes frequent reading from frequent reading embedded in responsive dialogue. The fourth tests whether equally high-quality non-reading narrative interaction produces the same associations, in which case the account would broaden to relational narrative scaffolding.

The predictions are intended as empirical discriminations, not as claims that a three-wave study would establish causality. Predictions 1 and 2 concern incremental association and a longitudinal indirect pathway under explicit assumptions about baseline measures and time-varying confounding; Predictions 3 and 4 require a preregistered comparison of reading frequency against interpretive interaction quality, and an adequately powered equivalence test with prespecified bounds for non-reading narrative interaction.

The pathway may also be discontinuous. Extensive shared reading in childhood may yield few narrative resources when the interaction is coercive, emotionally unsafe, or disconnected from the child’s experience. Conversely, an adolescent with little childhood reading may acquire such resources through later literary encounters, therapy, friendship, or cultural participation. Developmental pathways are probabilistic and context-sensitive.

The model is best understood as a developmental cascade with reciprocal and competing influences rather than a one-way pipeline. Child characteristics and family resources may shape the opportunity for shared reading; later reading choices and social contexts may reshape the same competencies. Repeated measures of reading interaction, autobiographical reasoning, and narrative engagement would be needed to distinguish stable individual differences from within-person developmental change.

5 Psychological health implications

This framework places reading-based psychological support between universal prevention and formal treatment. It does not show that shared reading prevents, alleviates, or treats a mental disorder; the defensible claim is narrower, that relational reading may create opportunities for emotional language, reflective dialogue, and meaning-making, with downstream health effects requiring direct evaluation.

Narrative meaning-making offers one possible bridge to health psychology. A developing life story can organize stressful events, preserve continuity across transitions, and connect present choices to valued futures. These processes may support coping, but narrative coherence is not equivalent to psychological health: a coherent story may also be rigid or self-blaming. The health-relevant question is whether reading-supported narrative resources increase flexible meaning-making, emotion regulation, and social integration (, ). Recent realist work suggests that reading for pleasure may operate through conversation, shared meaning-making, perspective-taking, and temporary relief from stress rather than through a universal reading effect (, ).

The public health relevance lies in reach and cost rather than in treatment effect. Shared reading is already embedded in schools, libraries, and community programmes, and it reaches families that do not enter clinical services without depending on clinical personnel. If the developmental links proposed here hold even partially, reading environments become a modifiable, low-cost target for mental health promotion, while effects on diagnosable disorder remain untested.

Access to reading is socially graded. Family income, parental literacy, home book density, school resources, digital access, and the presence of a reading adult shape how much interpretive interaction a child receives, and these conditions also predict mental health. Apparent reading effects may therefore reflect family advantage, and reading promotion may widen gaps if it reaches only families that are already resourced. Cultural context operates similarly. The model assumes joint reading between a child and an adult, a practice that is not universal. Where oral traditions are strong, narrative resources may be transmitted through storytelling, song, or religious practice rather than print; where meaning-making is carried by the family or group rather than the individual narrator, the outcome may need to be measured at that level; and where literacy access is limited, audio, pictorial, or community formats carry the same functions. Cultural and socioeconomic variables are therefore necessary moderators rather than background controls.

In families and schools, the immediate goal is to strengthen opportunities for reflective dialogue rather than to diagnose or treat a disorder. In libraries and community settings, shared reading may create opportunities for social connection without requiring a clinical identity; whether this reduces loneliness or improves mental health requires direct evaluation. In clinical contexts, reading can serve as an adjunctive resource when chosen collaboratively and when the limits of bibliotherapy are made explicit.

This account also discourages premature medicalization. A book is not a medication, and a reading group is not automatically psychotherapy. The psychological value of reading depends on context, developmental fit, relational safety, accessibility, and the reader’s interpretation. Treating reading as a developmental resource preserves its cultural and relational dimensions while allowing its health implications to be studied with methodological caution.

6 Limitations and research agenda

The central limitation is the absence of direct longitudinal evidence connecting childhood shared reading to narrative identity in emerging adulthood. Existing studies support separate segments of the account, but the full pathway remains a theoretical proposition. Future research should ask whether shared reading predicts later narrative identity, whether narrative identity mediates associations between reading experiences and well-being, and whether these associations remain after accounting for family socioeconomic status, parental education, home literacy resources, language environment, cultural context, personality, and baseline mental health.

One feasible first step is a preregistered measurement and association study of emerging adults combining retrospective measures of childhood shared reading, current reading engagement, autobiographical reasoning, narrative identity, and mental-health indicators. Such a design can assess construct relations and feasibility but cannot establish temporal order, mediation, or causality. Prospective research would need at least three waves, with childhood measures of reading interaction and baseline abilities, adolescent measures of narrative reasoning, and emerging-adult measures of narrative identity and psychological health. Family resources, parental burden, and intervention accessibility should be measured alongside print, audio, digital, and socially mediated reading.

Repeated measures in each developmental period would be preferable. A defensible longitudinal mediation test would preregister the temporal ordering, measure baseline versions of the mediator and outcome, specify a confounding-control strategy, and report sensitivity analyses. Cross-lagged or growth-based models may help separate stable between-person differences from within-person change, but no statistical model removes unmeasured confounding by itself.

Cultural context enters the agenda as a moderator rather than a control. Studies should test whether the reading-narrative association varies with the dominant narrative mode of the setting (print-based or oral), with the social unit that carries meaning-making (individual, family, or group), and with the delivery format (print, audio, pictorial, or community-based). Where literacy access is limited, format becomes a testable moderator rather than a fixed design feature.

7 Discussion

Reading-based psychological support has been examined as treatment, literacy practice, social participation, and identity work. A developmental account can connect these perspectives without merging them into one intervention. Shared reading may provide relational scaffolding in childhood, reading experiences may become narrative resources across adolescence, and emerging adults may use those resources while authoring an unsettled life story.

The value of this account lies in specifying what should be tested, for whom, under which relational conditions, and through which developmental mechanisms. Rather than asking whether books are therapeutic in the abstract, it asks how stories encountered with others may become part of the language through which a person later understands and narrates a life.

The more specific theoretical question is whether the revisitable and socially interpretable structure of reading adds explanatory value beyond general narrative socialization. If it does not, a developmental account of narrative scaffolding remains the appropriate contribution, with shared reading treated as one culturally accessible pathway rather than a privileged mechanism.

The framework extends process models of narrative self-development rather than replacing them. Those models locate identity work in situated storytelling and social response; the addition here is an input that precedes and accompanies the telling, since a text-mediated object gives the developing narrator material that is available before the capacity to tell is fully formed. If the reading-specific hypothesis fails, that is, if interpretive reading proves indistinguishable from equally responsive non-reading interaction, the framework reduces to a relational account of narrative scaffolding. That outcome would still be informative: it would place the active ingredient in the quality of interpretation rather than in the medium, and would redirect intervention design toward dialogue rather than book distribution.

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  19. HabermasTNegeleAMayerFB. “Honey, you’re jumping about”—mothers’ scaffolding of their children’s and adolescents’ life narration. Cogn Dev. (2010) 25:339–51. doi: 10.1016/j.cogdev.2010.08.004

  20. McLeanKCDunlapDJenningsSCLitvitskiyNSLilgendahlJP. Stability and change in autobiographical reasoning: a 4-year longitudinal study of narrative identity development. J Pers. (2022) 90:343–56. doi: 10.1111/jopy.12669, 

  21. KiddDCCastanoE. Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science. (2013) 342:377–80. doi: 10.1126/science.1239918, 

  22. PaneroMEWeisbergDSBlackJGoldsteinTRBarnesJLBrownellHet al. Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. J Pers Soc Psychol. (2016) 111:e46–54. doi: 10.1037/pspa0000064,

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  Keywords

bibliotherapy, developmental psychology, emerging adulthood, mental health promotion, narrative identity, self-narration, shared reading

Citation

Zhao M and Zhang Y (2026) From shared reading to self-narration: a developmental pathway for reading-based psychological support. Front. Public Health 14:1982716. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1982716

Received

30 August 2026

Revised

23 September 2026

Accepted

28 September 2026

Published

12 October 2026

Volume

14 - 2026

Edited by

Rosa Ana Alonso Ruiz, University of La Rioja, Spain

Reviewed by

Uğur Özbilen, Hakkari Universitesi Egitim Fakultesi, Türkiye

Ari Ambarwati, Universitas Islam Malang, Indonesia

Copyright

© 2026 Zhao and Zhang.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yishu Zhang, wmczys@wmu.edu.cn

 

Statements

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author contributions

MZ: Conceptualization, Writing – original draft. YZ: Supervision, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author(s) declared that financial support was received for this work and/or its publication. This work was supported by the Wenzhou Municipal Science and Technology Bureau (Grant No. RC20250302).

Conflict of interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The authors acknowledge the use of generative AI tools during the preparation of this manuscript for language editing, structural organization, and drafting support. Specifically, DeepSeek-4.1 (DeepSeek AI, https://www.deepseek.com) and GPT-5.6-terra (OpenAI, https://openai.com) were used. The authors reviewed and verified all content, interpretations, citations, and final wording, and take full responsibility for the submitted work.

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

 

 Figure 1 Proposed developmental mechanisms from shared reading to self-narration, with competing explanations. Solid arrows indicate hypothesized links rather than established causal effects. Dashed boxes indicate competing explanations and contexts that could account for the same outcomes without a reading-specific input, and the provisional status of the health-relevance component. Evidence status for each link is reported in Table 1.

 

 Table 1

Bibliotherapy in Italy

 https://visitlaveno.it/eventi-laveno/festival-della-biblioterapia/

Looks like Italy is developing bibliotherapy in new and unexpected territories.

This year's conference is all about gaming. 

Bibliotherapy Podcast

 https://podnews.net/podcast/i11qy1/episodes

 So happy that bibliotherapy is finally getting some traction here in the States : )

 

ZINES!

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DajZy1qzWi8/?igsh=MTlvbnlnODVscXRlOA==

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DajZy1qzWi8/?igsh=MTlvbnlnODVscXRlOA==

Lisa Carey LOVE IN THE ASYLUM

Quote: It's not good for her to have too many stimuli when she's just crawled back from the edge of psychosis, suicide or mania. Boredom is much more therapeutic.

Well-written and insightful, leaving one with more questions than it answers, Carey's novel is one powerful argument after another for expanding the definition of neurodivergent. We know so little about how our own brains work, I am convinced we are all on a spectrum, when it comes to defining normal.

May Sarton A WORLD OF LIGHT

"We become what we have loved."

Person-centered approach to bibliotherapy

 https://www.academia.edu/97358781/Bibliotherapy_for_Women_from_a_Lifelong_Learning_Perspective?email_work_card=thumbnail

Academic Experiential Study on Bibliotherapy

 https://www.academia.edu/110909140/Bibliotherapy_Use_of_books_for_healing_an_Experiential_Study_to_Introduce_Prospective_Bibliotherapy_Service_in_Libraries?email_work_card=abstract-read-more

Find books for fee or small fee

https://www.9thstreetbooks.com/how-to-get-a-library-card-online/

Canadian author Robert J. Sawyer FACTORING HUMANITY

Quote from reading Factoring Humanity: "Maybe the reason we sleep so much is that that's when we interact most closely with the overmind. Maybe dreams occur while our daily individual experiences are being uploaded to the overmind. It can kill you, you know--not dreaming. You can get all the rest in the world, but if you take chemicals that prevent you from dreaming, you'll die; that contact 'is' essential." Plays with Roger Penrose's theories of consciousness and Michael Persinger's experimental neuropsychology. He also refers to Philip Lieberman, who questioned Noam Chomsky's theories, and who wrote EVE SPOKE. As with another of my favorite authors, Richard Powers, Sawyer has explored multiple disciplines and done the research to find the juxtaposition point between and wrapped it all in compelling narrative for his readers' delight.

Canadian Authors Engel and Monro

Reading Marian Engel's THE GLASSY SEA after just finishing Alice Monro's TOO MUCH HAPPINESS. A quote I love from Engel: Time wins me away from the diamond of the soul. Said in reference to her character's spiritual experience while becoming a nun. Reading these two Canadian authors back to back paints a portrait of what it meant to be a young girl growing up in Canada between the Wars against a landscape of not just the harsh winters, but also the sweet, seductive brevity of summer. More Quotes from The Glassy Sea: "Life, I decided, is a sentence between brackets: these brackets must be seen to contain what is, not what might have been." and "If there's no absolute truth, you might as well go for what you want."

Book Matching

https://www.bookmatcher.app/how-it-works

Book Retreats

https://www.businesstraveller.com/lifestyle/how-to-fix-burnout-skip-the-spa-try-a-book-butler/

Leonora Carrington autobiography DOWN BELOW

https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/leonora-carrington/315580-down_below_read.html

medhum.org

Medhum.org

https://medhum.org/topics/#topic-tags

Will need to correct the broken link to NYU's database.

Does not seem to be as useful, or as compelling, as the original.

Reading Fiction and the Unconscious

by Simon O. Lesser

Published in 1957

LC 57-9091

Contents:

I. The Nature of the Inquiry

(Introducing psychoanalytical grounding for why fiction matters: didactic and mimetic intentions of the author.)

"By and large psychoanalytic interest in literature has run backward, from the work of art to its creator, whereas ours will flow forward, from the work of art to the reader."

II. The Reader of Fiction

Freud: the meager satisfaction that we extract from reality leaves us starving

(Fiction enables us to satisfy needs frustrated by reality.)

III. The Materials of Fiction

IV. The Appeals to the Parts of the Psyche

V. The Functions of Form

VI. The Language of Fiction

VII. Movement and Other Resources of Form

VIII. The Process of Response

IX. Conscious and Unconscious Perception

X. Participation and the Pathways to Satisfaction

XI. Tragedy, Comedy and the Esthetic Experience

Reading Recovery

https://www.academia.edu/78372467/Reading_for_Recovery_R4R_Bibliotherapy_for_addictions?email_work_card=reading-history 

 The Center of Alcohol Studies (CAS) Library at Rutgers University developed "Reading for Recovery" (R4R), an open-access online resource designed to bridge the gap between individuals struggling with substance abuse and expert-vetted literature. Funded by an ALA Carnegie-Whitney grant, the project utilizes bibliotherapy—the use of books to address therapeutic needs—by combining clinical self-help materials with broader literary works. 

 The initiative aims to empower librarians and addiction counselors with a searchable tool to support recovery, which is viewed as a continuous process rather than a discrete event. The R4R collection includes titles that are professionally reviewed and available in public or academic libraries, disseminated via a LibGuide and social networks like Goodreads and LibraryThing. 

 Sample from Appendix

The abbreviated version of the short story F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking” with questions, as used at the conference bibliotherapy workshop F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking” 

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. […] 

With a man I knew the trouble commenced with a mouse; in my case I like to trace it to a single mosquito. […] 

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality – a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death. 

This personality appeared all by himself in September on the twentieth floor of a New York hotel, as out of place as an armadillo. He was the result of New Jersey’s decreased appropriation for swamp drainage, which had sent him and other younger sons into neighboring states for food. 

The night was warm – but after the first encounter, the vague slappings of the air, the futile searches, the punishment of my own ears a split second too late, I followed the ancient formula and drew the sheet over my head. And so there continued the old story, the bitings through the sheet, the sniping of exposed sections of hand holding the sheet in place, the pulling up of the blanket with ensuing suffocation – followed by the psychological change of attitude, increasing wakefulness, wild impotent anger – finally a second hunt. 

This inaugurated the maniacal phase – the crawl under the bed with the standing lamp for torch, the tour of the room with final detection of the insect’s retreat on the ceiling and attack with knotted towels, the wounding of oneself – my God! – After that there was a short convalescence that my opponent seemed aware of, for he perched insolently beside my head – but I missed again. 

At last, after another half hour that whipped the nerves into a frantic state of alertness came the Pyrrhic victory, and the small mangled spot of blood, my blood, on the headboard of the bed. As I said, I think of that night, two years ago, as the beginning of my sleeplessness – because it gave me the sense of how sleep can be spoiled by one infinitesimal incalculable element. It made me, in the now archaic phraseology, “sleep-conscious.” 

I worried whether or not it was going to be allowed me. I was drinking, intermittently but generously, and on the nights when I took no liquor the problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime. 

A typical night (and I wish I could say such nights were all in the past) comes after a particularly sedentary work-and-cigarette day. It ends, say, without any relaxing interval, at the time for going to bed. All is prepared, the books, the glass of water, the extra pajamas lest I awake in rivulets of sweat, the luminol pills in the little round tube, the note book and pencil in case of a night thought worth recording. (Few have been – they generally seem thin in the morning, which does not diminish their force and urgency at night.) 

I turn in, perhaps with a night-cap – I am doing some comparatively scholarly reading for a coincident work so I choose a lighter volume on the subject and read till drowsy on a last cigarette. At the yawning point I snap the book on a marker, the cigarette at the hearth, the button on the lamp. I turn first on the left side, for that, so I’ve heard, slows the heart, and then – coma. 

So far so good. From midnight until two- thirty peace in the room. Then suddenly I am awake, harassed by one of the ills or functions of the body, a too vivid dream, a change in the weather for warm or cold. The adjustment is made quickly, with the vain hope that the continuity of sleep can be preserved, but no – so with a sigh I flip on the light, take a minute pill of luminol and reopen my book. 

The real night, the darkest hour, has begun. I am too tired to read unless I get myself a drink and hence feel bad next day – so I get up and walk. […] 

Back again now to the rear porch, and conditioned by intense fatigue of mind and perverse alertness of the nervous system – like a broken-stringed bow upon a throbbing fiddle – I see the real horror develop over the roof-tops, and in the strident horns of night- owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers’ arrival over the way. 

Horror and waste – – Waste and horror – what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash. I need not have hurt her like that. Nor said this to him. Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable 

The horror has come now like a storm – what if this night prefigured the night after death – what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope – only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. 

I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four. On the side of the bed I put my head in my hands. Then silence, silence – and suddenly – or so it seems in retrospect – suddenly I am asleep. 

Sleep – real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness – my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair. […] 

Irresistible, iridescent – here is Aurora – here is another day. 

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS 

1. Reread the first paragraph. What might be different about each person’s insomnia? What might be similar enough that the narrator can make generalizations, or hope that readers might recognize their own insomnia in his (as he seems to have with Hemingway’s Now I Lay Me)? 

2. Why does the mosquito disrupt the narrator’s ability to sleep? Why has the effect of that night lasted? 

3. What might it mean for the narrator to regret having “broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable”? 

4. What kind of relationship does the narrator seem to have to sleep? What kind of promise does it have for him? What does he crave about it? 

5. Drinking comes up here in an interesting context. Where is it? What does he use it for? 

6. Why might this story be relevant to the process of addiction and recovery? Is insomnia similar to addiction, or potentially connected?

Poetry

https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-form/

https://wordwool.com/types-of-poems/

Dream Database

https://sleepanddreamdatabase.org/

Walrus

 https://thewalrus.ca/bibliotherapy/

Bibliotherapy is a therapeutic practice that uses literature to help individuals cope with life challenges and mental distress. It is divided into clinical bibliotherapy, conducted by certified therapists, and nonclinical bibliotherapy, often facilitated by librarians. Proponents and cognitive science research suggest that fiction allows readers to objectively process their emotions by identifying with characters, potentially increasing empathy and reducing stress. While the practice has a long history dating back to eighteenth-century asylums and is more widespread in the UK, it remains a niche field in Canada, where there is no formal licensing organization. Practitioners like Hoi Cheu use tailored reading lists to create a "cocooned space" for clients, such as Anne Boulton, to explore personal issues more gently than in traditional therapy.

Caitlin R. Kiernan LiveJournal

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com

Kiernan

Neuroscience of Reading

 

https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/5209/files/2017/01/Armstrong-How-Literature-Plays-with-the-Brain.pdf

Neuroscience and Arts

https://www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/the-arts-and-the-brain

Feminist Fiction Recommended Titles (in process)

Woman on the Edge of Time Small Changes City of Darkness, City of Light Sex Wars Native Tongue Female Man Golden Notebook Memoirs of a Survivor Briefing for a Descent Into Hell Handmaid's Tale Edible Woman Surfacing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Temple of My Familiar Mists of Avalon Joy Luck Club Woman Warrior Red Tent Orlando Room of One's Own Kindred Parable of the Sower Wide Sargasso Sea Gate to Women's Country Middlemarch Fear of Flying Clan of the Cave Bear Fingersmith Tipping the Velvet Foxfire Girl, Interrupted Delta of Venus Diviners Stone Angel Fire-Dwellers Devil's Arithmetic Diamond Age As We Are Now Bellwether Red Azalea Fight Night

Alan Watts Out of Your Mind

You are continuous with the universe.

This moment is eternity.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcPWU59Luoc

Poetic Forms

https://wordwool.com/types-of-poems/

books that changed my life: in progress

Reading the Book that Changed My Life: 71 remarkable writers celebrate the books that matter most to them,

Has inspired this beginning of a list:

1. At 9, not the first adult novel I had read, but the first from the adult section in the public library, for which I was reprimanded when I was hungry and clueless enough to ask the librarian where I would find more books by Margaret Mitchell.

2. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

At 18, opened up the world in a way that travel up, until this point, had only imagined. I have read all of Hesse since then and yet they all remain part and parcel of that one thin paperback novel.

3. At 13 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte indirectly addressed the idea that one's passion may not be one's destiny. Choice comes into play even when every hormone in the body screams otherwise. Letting the tall, dark and handsome, broody one get away is often the only way to keep what's you for yourself. Controlled passion became a theme throughout my teen years to which I adhered somewhat successfully to greater and lesser degrees, and now largely defines my sexuality.

4. Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO redefined social expectations in my 20's when I realized that the hardcore feminists, who had insisted I must be a lesbian to be a feminist, were self-serving  in their proclamation. Loving the male and female parts of myself equally, for different reasons, was part of loving myself, regardless of the social pressures from either side of the divide to affix a label.

5. In my 30's it was Joseph Gold's READ FOR YOUR LIFE that gave my reading purpose. I learned with great disappointment that Reader Response Theory had gone out of fashion by the time I was studying literature at university, but without calling it that, Gold's book was a master's class in the process of reading as a form of self-analysis to which I continue to adhere.

6. Though introduced to scifi in my 30's by DUNE and Delaney, it wasn't until my 40's that I really acknowledged genre fiction as literary. ISLAND by Huxley was the clincher and so many others many others now besides. Margaret Atwood's SURFACING had made an earlier impression but HANDMAID'S TALE was next level.

5. By my 50's, I was a librarian and THE DIAMOND AGE by Neal Stephenson gave me glimpse into a new world of information rich living. Suzette Hagen Elgin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Tongue_(Elgin_novel)

6. My 60's turned the tables and writing became part of my reading experience to a much greater degree. Journals and memoirs became sources of information pointing me back to my 20's when I first encountered Doris Lessing and Ana's Nin, my 30's with Marge Piercy. Re-Discovering Octavia E. Butler, having read her vampire series earlier but re-visiting her Cassandra-like vision of 2024 in the Parable series.