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Josh Cohen’s wonderful book, ‘How to Live. What to do. How great novels help us change’, is a book to be slowly read and treasured. To me, a life-long reader and student of fiction, it is an entrancing read. It combines my two loves, literature and psychoanalysis (if I can grandly describe them as that, despite inevitably only having scraped the surface of both); and it reminds me why I came so naturally to psychotherapy after studying literature at university, both as an undergraduate and postgraduate student, and after working for many years as an English teacher.
The title of his book, Cohen explains, comes from a Wallace Stevens poem, which does not clearly tell us anything at all about how to be, or what to do. The title is such a marvellous and humorous understatement of what it is to be alive: time propels us helplessly forward, while we try to make sense of the world. The title seems to refer both to the existential question ‘why am I here?’, but also to the everyday struggles we experience. Analysing what the poem does do, Cohen explores this idea in his introduction – could there be something which would fully answer this question? Cohen describes the prescriptions (what to do) which might be offered by the self-help genre, as ‘go[ing] awry’, and instead observes:
We may recognise aspects of ourselves in a fictional character or psychotherapeutic case study; but we will also be struck by the singularity of each of them, their tenacious attachment to being themselves and no ne else. (p. xv)
He links the experience of reading to that of being in psychotherapy:
[…] a patient wants above all to be heard as a person rather than a case, an individual with a unique history and personality, not an impersonal cluster of symptoms. Psychotherapy is about discovering this person, not a composite type. (p. xv)
He continues:
When psychotherapy is successful, it works in much the way that great fiction works: that is, it induces the near-miraculous sensation of the very cor