Talking about feelings is part of the therapeutic process. Writing is also a healing activity in that it helps to organize ideas and understand one’s emotions.
This is how Beatriz Abreu, a Portuguese language teacher at Sesi-SP and a master’s student in Arts of the Scene at the Escola Superior de Artes Célia Helena, wrote the book “Cansei de ser police station” during the social isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The work presents psychological tales in which feelings such as loneliness, existential emptiness and sadness are evident, as well as fluid poems.
Although the texts are not autobiographical, they reflect the author’s experiences, which connected themes such as bullying, abandonment, search for freedom, grief and suicide.
When building the characters, Beatriz paid attention to the male figures, emotionally fragile in the texts, reflecting a strongly rooted culture that men do not need to take care of their mental health.
The verses, on the other hand, present universal feelings and symptoms by presenting poetic definitions for anxiety and insomnia, for example.
Read below a text about the relationship between literature and mental health that the author wrote exclusively for the blog.
By Beatriz Abreu
Catharsis, epiphany and verisimilitude are characteristics of the art of speech. In this sense, it is possible to affirm that literature is a therapeutic manifestation.
After all, the author accesses his psychic and social records to write — he always talks about himself, even when he says about the other. His worldview leaks through the pages of the work.
The reader, on the other hand, drinks from this emotional source and, when feeling identification with a plot or character, discovers himself as an understood subject.
Sigmund Freud postulated that verbalization is part of the healing process in psychoanalytic analyses. Thus, by putting stories and feelings into words, literature enhances the release of repressed emotions, memories and feelings.
It’s no wonder that many consider journaling a beneficial exercise for mental health. However, it is important to note: therapeutic activity is not synonymous with therapy.
Popular usage of the expression “therapeutic” denotes “that which brings calm” or “that which reduces stress.”
In fact, reading and writing can be relaxing activities. However, when, at the end of the 18th century, Romanticism proposed that man write about his feelings towards the world, literature became more egoic and subjective, presenting depressive nuclei in several texts, such as those of Goethe (author of the famous —and controversial— book “The Sorrows of Young Werther”) and the Byronic generation.
This transformation has repercussions on contemporary literature, which has the freedom to be dense and expose social criticism. It is a therapeutic art in the sense that it is capable of bringing many emotional waters to the surface.
The creative process, not infrequently, involves diving deeply into these waters — which, in some cases, turn out to be murky. In other words, literature is capable of putting us in contact with different feelings, not all of them mild. Only therapy can help the individual to swim without drowning.
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Source: Folha
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