Bibliotherapy and the Pharmacology of Fiction

Abstract

In this contribution, I aim to interpret the famous scene in Homer’s Odyssey (Book 8) in which the epic hero is confronted with a story of his own life at the court of the Phaeacians, as a primal scene of bibliotherapy. Building on earlier interpretations of the scene by Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, I will discuss Odysseus’s response to the stories that are sung to him in relation to concept of pharmacological thinking proposed by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. According to Stiegler, pharmacology is a way of thinking that considers the simultaneously positive and negative effects of a phenomenon. In our specific case, literature can be both a medicine and a poison for the mind.