Books can change our worldview! Books can delight, enchant, teach or just provide a momentary escape from reality, but can books also be therapy?

“[The] idea that books can make us emotionally, psychologically and even physically better goes back to the ancient world.

Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for "mindless pleasure" but "as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself". It's no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. …

By the Renaissance, the idea that poetry and song could "banish vexations of soul and body" was well-entrenched - to the point where Thomas Puttenham argued, in The Art of English Poesie, that the poet must "play also the physician and not only by applying a medicine to the ordinary sickness of mankind, but by making the very grief itself (in part) cure of the disease"… ”

In Post #151692 I write (about Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose), ” I have never enjoyed reading anything as much I do this - a slow savouring of words and life - that I was too busy to enjoy when younger. I just feel so good!”

It is as if in re-reading this book, I am restoring my mental equilibrium and my consciousness to a state of quiet joy. I did not set out to do this, but slowly, perhaps though a combination of things, I feel made whole though the process of reading.

John Stuart Mill describes how, “ … one day "a small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father's death ... A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my being grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a stone." “

All quotes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/05/fiction.scienceandnature

Do you think that reading can be a healing experience. Why do you read books?