애도를 위한 문학치료의 가능성과 불가능성

Abstract

This paper tries to show that the literary therapy has both possibility and impossibility. We cannot cure all the mental illness but only heal the patients who are able to read a book voluntarily by the literary therapy. It is the developmental therapy not clinical therapy provided in this paper. This paper interrogates into a connection between mourning and literary therapy. Especially, the novel’s narrative deal with the question of the loss, lack, and melancholia. Freud argues the relation of melancholia and mourning. He says the lack of mourning is equal to melancholia. But gradually Freud insists that the ego is fundamentally a melancholic ego. Namely, the ego is sediment of loss and lack. Nietzsche and Deleuze give us an insight for the health and illness. In their sense, the health is not a certain or uniform condition but a course balancing ourselves in life. And being in good health means the possibility of getting hurt. So, according to these viewpoints, the good health is not in an absolute condition without illness or wound. And the perfect mourning is impossible, simply we may aim for mourning constantly. The novel “The Spacial Criteria Selecting Love” written by Hyung-Gyung Kim has an aspect that makes readers who are feeling a sense of loss consoled by identifying with the novel’s characters. In this novel, the main characters heal little by little through melancholic incorporation not the complete conclusion of mourning. This paper proves the (im)possibility of literary therapy through experiment of a female reader(or counselee).