‘몸 아픈 이’의 존재론적 돌봄을 위한 상호교류적 읽기 기반 독서치료

Abstract

This article explores the potential of bibliotherapy interventions to help individuals with physical illnesses integrate their existential personhood disrupted by illness. The bibliotherapy discussed in this article aims to provide existential care by aiding patients in profoundly understanding and interpreting the suffering caused by their illness. Through this process, patients can explore themselves anew, thus activating all their capacities and potential to endure the challenges of their lives. This type of reading therapy has a specific theoretical basis for a health-generation model. Based on this model, a person who can move toward a “healthier state” in the face of severe stress has “integrative power (sense of coherence concept: SoC)” and emphasizes comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. Therefore, the therapeutic direction of reading for individuals with health challenges is as follows: 1) openness and expression of the patient’s suffering, 2) cultivation of psychological flexibility, 3) restoration of personal wholeness by exploring the existential meaning of illness, and 4) mutual understanding and solidarity with the community. This study developed a reading therapy method based on an “interactive reading experience.” Interactive reading is a metaphorical transformation of understanding and accepting a text as the world of another into an interpretation of resemblance. This allows the story of one’s life (source domain) to be redrawn and transformed. The reader finds similarities to themselves in the text and respects the author as a being with experiences and ideas different from their own, and “rewrites their own life story with the author.” 1) Evoke: Personal ventilation of pain; 2) Connect: Metaphorical transformation through connection with the artist and the work; 3) Reflect: Transformation of self and society. The program was applied to a middle-aged woman who experienced a cerebral infarction at the age of 55. Due to the sudden onset of the disease, the client suffered from reduced social roles, identity confusion, and feelings of shame. Five sessions of counseling were planned and conducted using autobiographies, poems, and myths to express the pain of the disease, reacquaint her with it, and foster a sense of existential unity. Through her autobiography, she expressed and validated the loneliness and pain of her illness, which she could not confide in anyone. She also modeled how to reflect on her past life through her illness and reflected on and modified her attitude toward her body. The poem “To the Sick” (Cho Byung-hwa) uses the metaphor of “sickness as a friend” to search for another truth in life. Thus, the metaphors of “welcoming sickness” and “sickness as a talisman” were created to change the value of sickness. In the poem “By Reading With the Flies” (Kim Soo-young), the author expanded her awareness of the problem of illness to a social level and reconsidered the human destiny of death and decline. In the myth of “Baridegi,” she saw that “Baridegi is my body” and evaluated the “life water” she brought as a heroic journey to find a new way of life for herself. Interactive bibliotherapy proved to be an optimal way for those with health challenges to regain their existential integration.