Finding a Thinker in Yourself:

An Interview with Dr. Philip Davis:

How can literature trigger self-uncovering and growth? How can it be used in formalized settings relating to mental health? In this interview, Dr. Philip Davis discusses his Reader Group organization which has grown to over 500 groups running weekly in the UK as well as sister organizations in Denmark, Belgium, and Norway. He also talks about his collaboration with neuroscientists exploring why strange language brings us outside automaticity, spurring new emotions and ideas. Supporting the concept that neither literature nor the people it describes can be curled to fit labels, Davis considers how literature can open us to all life’s corners saying, “Literature changes the stereotyped order of things. You get to the future by recovering the past.”

One of our journal’s aims is to explore poetry/language as tools for wellbeing, and your article “Making sense of mental health difficulties through live reading: an interpretative phenomenological analysis of the experience of being in a Reader Group” speaks to this goal. Could you explain the Reader Group (RG) setup used in your studies? How did you get interested in shared reading as a health intervention?

What you call “RG” are groups of about 6-8 people led by a trained reader employee, often a volunteer. What’s crucial about these groups and distinguishes them from reading groups as conventionally conceived is that nothing is read in advance—the model for book clubs is often quite limited to an ethnographic spectrum and modern novels which are just talked about after being read independently. That setup doesn’t seem to me as if it can move discussions very far beyond opinion, and one of the most important things here is to get beyond fixed attitudes, to shake you up. The crucial matter is that these readings occur alive and aloud, whether we’re looking at a poem, short story, or, over several weeks, a novel. What we’re always looking for is any form of breakthrough.

It’s important to look at the widest possible range of literature on the assumption that the most relevant and therefore predictable language might not be the most powerful. The thing that takes you by surprise, from 200 years ago perhaps, that looks totally different, may seize your imagination and be a bigger boost to your thinking. In terms of that boost, I don’t think initially anyone was thinking of the RGs in terms of mental health. Glad that I am that mental health is being discussed and that literature is finding a role as non-therapeutic therapy, the RG’s association with mental health is at some level an opportunistic convenience: in previous decades, reading groups could have been linked to education; in previous centuries, to religion. So in one sense, with literature it doesn’t matter what the framework is. Yes, it matters that it gets quiet in the room, that people come ready to take some risks. But they shouldn’t be packaged as mental health interventions since there is no formal process of diagnosis and treatment. It wouldn’t be considered literature on prescription, for example to say “I’ve got a problem with my brother, therefore reading The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot is a really great thing to do.” I’m not going to be snotty about relevance, if it works it’s fine, but the idea that “this is your problem and this book will fix it” is less likely than if you’re taken by surprise by something that gets under your skin regardless of its obvious relation. Literature is not about set themes and capital letters and all the things our education will sometimes suggest. It’s not always the best investment to be thinking about tick-box targets—if one good moment opens somebody up, creates a breakthrough in their thinking and feeling, I think that chance is a genuine investment.

This raises some other questions for me. Are the group members usually people that have experience as literary readers? 

There is a wide variety of readers. Some are simply community groups congregating in a library, a school, children’s center, centers for the elderly, prisons, or drug and rehab centers. Experienced or not, sometimes the best thing is when people see an advert and they’re not sure, they’re a bit frightened or not automatically interested, thinking how can this do me any good? But then, the books get to them and they’re converted. This is a good reminder for us “academics” because if we’re not careful, we can take literature for granted. You can get stuck in a lot of technical language and methodologies. But to remember what the primary uses of literature are and to see someone encounter it as if for the first time is important in academe. Like the old prophets say, rediscover the spirit and purpose of the thing or it can easily get lost.

Would there be a difference if they thought they were coming into these reading groups in order to experience breakthroughs, even if they weren’t framed as therapy?

It’s crucial that this is not set up as an intervention. A doctor might say, this could be good: if you used to be a reader and are now depressed, it can help you start again; if you’re not a reader but you want something where you can talk about human life without talking about your own life, it can provide a space. One of the interesting things that we found in drug and rehab centers for example is that people who have had a lot of therapy often begin their sentences by identifying as an alcoholic, speaking as a user. So suddenly having something that cuts through those categories, those self-conscious labels and says implicitly, “this person that you’re reading about is just a human being, you don’t know anything about him and the poem doesn’t know anything about you” can open a new self-understanding. The whole trick is to not know too much in advance. Of course, many of our fears are about wanting to know in advance, but that also is what makes us a bit dead.

At the moment, I’m writing a book about William James, Henry James’s brother, and I’m very interested in learning more about the founding of psychology. As you know, William James struggled deeply with depression before he found his vocation. Though I think it’s very important that people can talk and get help when they’re struggling, the great thing about his form of psychology is that fundamentally, he isn’t primarily interested in talking about what’s wrong with you. When you read William James’s work, you see that he overcomes depression by not having much to do with it. It gives you stuff that makes you feel more alive, as if that vibrancy could get under or get over whatever you kept repeatedly saying to yourself. One of the symptoms of depression as you’ll know is generalized memory and rumination: that you keep saying to yourself I’m a terrible person, life is awful. But an advantage of literature is that it’s not so general. Suddenly there’s a specific turn in the story, a specific moment that can get under all that, and that’s what I’m interested in psychologically: turning the aliveness of the groups into the liveliness of response.

How have your findings of the effect of RGs on dementia compared to those on mental illnesses?

When they were first approached to go into care homes, the reading group facilitators were very skeptical. They were worried that it wouldn’t work due to various forms of mental deterioration, particularly that of working memory. Certainly, there have to be some adaptations so that you’re not doing long stretches of reading, but poems especially worked very well indeed. There are quite a few references when we’re doing self-reports the idea of “keeping my brain going.”

But the main thing that interests me in regards to dementia are specific cases. In one care home, there was a lady who hadn’t spoken in ages when an E.E. Cummings poem was read, a poem about five children that go to the seaside where they see a variety of things including a starfish. As they were reading it, suddenly the lady did say one word: “bathroom.” Immediately, the carers assumed that she wanted to go to the toilet. They were about to take her when her daughter, who’d been sitting in, said, “Wait.” In their old bathroom growing up, there had been a painting of the seaside with a starfish, and the poem led her mother to recall it. Carers don’t like silence in dementia homes, they like something to happen. In this case, you realize that out of the listening, something latent was triggered that she couldn’t articulate a whole sentence for, a whole framework for. Fortunately, the daughter could describe that and the result was that the relationship between the daughter and the mother was reestablished, the mother began to talk more to her group and to the daughter and two weeks later, the mother remembered the name of her daughter’s partner. These are small games in a condition that is not remediable; it’s only going to get worse. But some of the commissioners I’ve talked to have said, “I don’t care what your claim is to the long or short term effects of this intervention: if this creates a good moment in an hour, then that is reason enough.” Another benefit to these flashes is that they can convince both the carers and the relatives that the person is still there. The moral here is that there is something deeper in the creature, below the level of consciousness and intent, that you can reach the person through literature, which is not just based on consciousness but on core-being sometimes triggered through memory or emotion, even when it’s painful like the C Day-Lewis poem “Walking Away.” Although it’s important to have safety around, people to talk to, people to watch the effects, you shouldn’t hygienize the literature, assuming the goal of life is to feel nice.  

Another example related to dementia was a lady who spoke up upon hearing a poem about life’s up and downs, saying in relation to one of the downs, “I hate that bit.” She had nominal aphasia—she would just say “its” and “things” and “they.” When encouraged, she continued, “But they don’t go the way they want them to, or don’t want them to.” That’s a complicated sentence. The nouns could go, the structure could go, but the complexity of the syntax was still there as she tried to get her head around events and feelings that didn’t fall straightforwardly. I thought that was a fantastic discovery. And the great thing about research here is that you can see people thinking: you can film it, you can talk to them about it, show them the recordings. This research isn’t very far from what’s happening.

An interesting thing is that even when a poem was brought in that they had seen before, for example Wordsworth’s “Daffodils,” even if they’d just read it two weeks before and didn’t remember it, they had new things to say about it, new insights. What people had not realized in relation to those living with dementia is that they can think new things even if it’s about the exact same line. Literature brings out something different: it’s more like a renewal.

What are some qualities of a successful reader group?

The goal is the get the poem out into the room, alive. If there isn’t any sort of emotion, then it’s no good. I think of the case history of Kevin, a pseudonym, who’s in the drug and rehab group. From his point of view, therapy worked like this: if he said, “I was really tempted to have a drink today but I didn’t,” everyone would say well done. So he said okay, that must be what they want to hear, and he could con his way through that. But then in the RG, they were reading Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, the one about shame. And suddenly it got him—he knew what it was like to be ashamed “in fortunes and men’s eyes.” He said that the thing about poetry was that you couldn’t lie your way around it. It got you involuntarily because you didn’t expect it and therefore couldn’t guard against it. “Behaviors,” Kevin said, “I can cope with those. But if I got the feeling, then I was done for.” I think nothing can happen without that surprise.

Some of these people know a lot about serious trouble, and a lot of literature is about serious troubles. What you would hope to happen in readers is what happens to writers: writers can use their troubles to good effect. Why can’t we all? Because all those things we’re ashamed of, denied, damaged by, are useful experiences. This is the problem with the positive/negative pop-psychology division because for a lot of people, it’s in their ostensibly negative emotions like loss that a lot of the value, positive value, of their lives is lodged. So that idea that the negative is not negative is crucial with literature.

A psychiatrist who ran a reading group for several years believed that you should not try to move on from your problems but rather recover what had been lost, more innocent or idealistic or warm feelings that you felt had been damaged by what you had done or what had been done to you. But literature could recover those, bring them back, and that was a major psychological achievement. Literature changes the stereotyped order of things. You get to the future by recovering the past. What is most powerful is not what is seen as most immediately relevant. The targets are probably inefficient—all of those things need to be fed into the public agenda. Literature reformulates the agenda itself and challenges the assumptions of some psychologies. The PANAS scale of positive and negative affect was administered within the reading groups and after several weeks, it logged an increase in wellbeing. However, this did not mean an increase in happiness but rather that the group members were more able to tolerate and find value in the so-called negative feelings.

How do you understand distance between literature and life? 

This is a terrific question but clearly a difficult one! The distance is in some sense important because you can manage things in writing and in reading that you can’t always on the spot. But actually of course literature is probably the closest model of what existence is like and how to think within the existences that we have. So distance isn’t the word I would use here—there is some psychic distance, yes, but just like safety in the groups, it’s used for something other than safety. Distance is used for risk and venture. So, conversely, distance is used for closeness, for finding a holding ground between literature and life in which you can think about both through the resonance triggered by literature. As I find for myself when reading, if I can create that emotional resonance then when it really takes off I don’t know where I am. I don’t know whether I’m reading a book or thinking or remembering something. Very early on in school, I was a good student, determined to learn things in a very strict sort of way. One time, I was reading Joseph Conrad’s Shadowline to learn the lines by heart for exams. But I suddenly forgot that task at this line: “And suddenly his eyes became open to the inwardness of things.” Suddenly, the character sees something a human being that he realizes is only real to them. I love it now when I don’t know where I am, you know that funny faraway look people have when they’re reading and look up a little bit—Proust is very good at describing this, getting called into dinner while reading. But when he sits down, it takes him some time to get back into human speech because he’s been at a different level. There is a place which isn’t between literature and life but actually it’s so muddled that you don’t know which is which and that’s the greatest place to be because if you did know, that would be the most uninteresting thing in the world.

Throughout the studies, what have been some common impacts reported by participants in the Reader Groups? Have there been many individual differences regarding who tends to benefit most from RGs?

When I think of impacts, I’m reminded of what Oliver Sacks calls “awakenings.” But it’s not L-Dopa here, it’s literature. I’m not looking for people to be cured, for people to be morally bettered—I don’t think literature can do that. I’m afraid it hasn’t for me. But I do think they can be stimulated, triggered into having what James calls “the more” of themselves, and that’s a powerful impact. I hope there are as many individual differences as there are individuals in the groups because they’re intended to reach people creatively, imaginatively. Those small reading groups are just a small image of what a society would look like, and literature would be a trigger in the warmth.

Could you talk about Bowlby’s attachment theory in relation to RGs?

I’m interested in trauma, and I think that literature helps admit into consciousness what trauma is having to keep out, attaching again to one’s previous experience. I’m interested in how people might attach not only to the literature but to each other within the reading groups. One of the things that we’re trying to work on in my research center surrounds some very interesting research done on babies and their mothers. From a very early age, sub-vocal, pre-vocal, even sub-cognitive forms of interaction are occurring. Sometimes in the reading groups, interactions occur that derive from that primal one. So that idea of how the space between people closes or becomes smaller or warm is related to attachment theory.

One of the best things in the groups is when people are able to, without bitterness, experience things they haven’t had. Scousa, a 40 year old Liverpool guy, was reading a poem about love when he suddenly said, “I like those soft things”—soft, that’s the word blokes will use. The poem says, I would do anything for you, I will love you to an extent that could have seemed weak or even cajoling. But Scousa moved by these words because he hadn’t had them for another. The definition of imagination could simply be that, the memory of what you haven’t had and can value rather than be merely scarred by not having. You can appreciate it though you hardly dare to want any more. That’s about reattachment really, no matter what one wasn’t given during childhood.

Do you have any predictions or thoughts about shared reading as an augment to or replacement for CBT?

CBT is good at breaking down rumination and repetitive patterns. But some people feel that it doesn’t go past surface-level solving of a problem. If the problems are severe enough, this surface-solving may be a preparation for being able to use what through literature could become unstuck. So that would be one way for CBT to go alongside shared reading and help to unfreeze people. My colleague Josie Billington wrote a paper with a chronic pain specialist who used CBT to treat patients. The specialist noted a difference between CBT and RGs that I found meaningful: CBT treats people as those who are very consciously suffering from pain, but in the reading groups they are just people. They want something that can take their mind off the pain, make them be human beings and not just sufferers. CBT is a top-down mechanism and our argument from the research center is that top-down mechanisms are useful, but they are less likely to embed themselves as bottom-up interventions. If something rises viscerally from you as a form of discovery, something of yours that you can work with or work from, then that’s better than inhibition. CBT works by saying don’t think about this, and literature works by saying do think about it, but also feel it. The value of this is stepping outside diagnoses and overcoming obstacles. You don’t try to blot out your troubles but instead, you try to use them.

In your article “Shared reading: assessing the value of literature as an arts based intervention,” these questions are raised: “Is the therapeutic effect at the expense of the literature which prompts it? Is therapeutic a too medicalized term for reading’s intrinsic value?” What is your understanding of these contradictions?

Psychologist W.R. Bion is interested in what he calls the “oh”—a non-name. “Oh” refers to the really-real. You can’t know it but you can almost bear it, or bear to get near to it. As you can imagine, in a psychoanalytic session the tally is whether you are getting closer or further away from “oh.” You may not know what “oh” is, you may never know what “oh” is but you can tell if you are nearer or further away.

As to whether it’s too medicalized a term, yes. Everything is too medicalized and we need to be careful. It’s a rough and ready business, the world, so there will be exaggerations and over-simplifications. Literature gets us into examples of specifics that are more real than these terms. What happens after is you don’t aim for medical effect, though you may have advantageous mental or health benefits concomitant of being venturesome or able to think about your life. One of the great things that Bion does say is that if you have thoughts that you need to think from your past but you can’t think them, that’s what makes you ill or diminished. So, literature could trigger the capacity to find a thinker in yourself for your own thoughts. I think there are huge human benefits that psychology would recognize, but the language of literature is always opposed to labels. I’m distressed when in education, literary minded people are going back to the labels in a way that’s completely dissociated from the way a writer would think.

In your article “How Shakespeare Tempests the Brain,” you talk about how functional shifts — the use of a semantically appropriate word in a syntactically inappropriate role — can force the listener to engage more in what’s being said. Could you talk more about how this happens and how you came to understand the phenomenon better?

I had an intuition that the movement of syntax in a mirrored and had effects on the pathways of the brain. I took this to some neuroscientists and we came up with the term “functional shift,” which as you say is an unfamiliar use of a word in a sentence. An example of one is from Shakespeare’s Lear where the word “madded” is used. Never before in the language had this been used—it’s not “maddened” or “made mad,” it’s an adjective suddenly turned into a verb. Or from Coriolanus, this old man says he “godded” me—not deified, not made a god of. These moments are very characteristic of Shakespeare and close to the sorts of grammatical fluidity that can happen in Elizabethan poetics. There were electrodes placed on the scalp which demonstrated that the brain did react to the functional shifts. After the advent of the “wow” word, there was a spike in the brain’s electrical activity, the brain saying, “get ready for more of what’s unknown.” We then put people in the fMRI machine which measuring oxygenated states to help you understand where things are happening. One of the areas that it affects is an area that’s underactivated in depressives. I’m not saying it will cure depression, but this moment of surprise, confusion, enlightenment is an anti-depressive. You could say a word like “godded” and you don’t know if it’s a noun or a verb. Based on our research, it seems this calls to action parts of the brain that are used to find your way around in the dark through an emergent consciousness. Mapping this onto the groups, people are getting out of their usual pathways and being jolted into something that makes more alive inside themselves.

When working on projects that bridge psychology, literature, and neuroscience, what are some of the difficulties in collaborating between disciplines? What might be some of the rewards?

There are no difficulties if you get the right people. Like with the brain-imaging, you learn a different language that enables you to undo some names and clichés. “Emotion,” for example, can get too soppy but if you think of it as the sudden excitation in response to a stimulus that you hadn’t seen coming, that can revitalize the thing itself. And that you can even do x-rays of thinking type responses, I loved all that. It was always as if there was an act of translation going on. That would go on best when we had films—we could all reach a consensus about the moment when something was happening, then around a common core of data, we’d then try out and combine our different languages. If human beings are multidimensional, then the more those dimensions can be represented and brought together, the better. Brain imaging, eye tracking, apps, changes in voice, issues about interactions through primal eye contact, interviews, behavioral catalogs—this wide range of methodologies is a way of trying to do best justice to our complexities. The formulation that William James liked was “it’s as if.” This is not the vocabulary of doubt but rather the vocabulary of speculative imagination, the launch pad that allows you to think without knowing quite where you’re going. Once, a guy in prison was reading a poem about remorse when he turned to the group and said, “I think I have learned remorse, maybe.” The word you can most trust here is the “maybe.” Its nuance, which came from a wealth of doubtful experience, makes the previous part of the statement more meaningful. In our research teams, we analyze the responses of the people in the group with as much force as the words in a poem or story. It really is about reading as a revolution more than about fancy words like “poetry” that put people off. I for one wouldn’t be able to do any thinking about myself, existence, without literature.