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Therapy through Faerie: Therapeutic Properties of Fantasy Literature by the Inklings and by U. K. Le Guin by Anna Cholewa-Purgal, and: The Lure of the Ring: Power, Addiction and Transcendence in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Alan James Strachan and Janet Coster

2020; West Virginia University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tks.2020.0014

1547-3163

John Rosegrant,

Child Therapy and Development

Reviewed by: Therapy through Faerie: Therapeutic Properties of Fantasy Literature by the Inklings and by U. K. Le Guin by Anna Cholewa-Purgal, and: The Lure of the Ring: Power, Addiction and Transcendence in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings by Alan James Strachan and Janet Coster John Rosegrant Therapy through Faerie: Therapeutic Properties of Fantasy Literature by the Inklings and by U. K. Le Guin, by Anna Cholewa-Purgal. Frankfurt; New York: Peter Lang, 2017. 381 pp. $69.95 (Epub). ISBN 978-3-631-67381-2. The Lure of the Ring: Power, Addiction and Transcendence in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, by Alan James Strachan and Janet Coster. [US: s.l.], 2018. xvi, 69 pp. $8.95 (softcover). Available through Amazon. ISBN 978-1-732-3156-0-0. [End Page 229] That reading Tolkien can be emotionally healing and inspirational is a familiar idea that has been discussed both from a Christian perspective, for example by Wood and Pearce, and from a secular perspective, for example by Curry in his examination of Tolkien as reenchanting the world. I have previously written about Tolkien having special emotional relevance for the developmental steps of adolescence ("Tolkien's Dialogue"). The two books here under review focus on healing and inspiration through a psychotherapeutic lens, Cholewa-Purgal claiming that reading Tolkien, the Inklings, and Ursula Le Guin can be a form of psychotherapy, and Strachan and Coster ranking characters from The Lord of the Rings on a scale of psychospiritual health (Sauron at the bottom and Tom Bombadil at the top) to recommend a path of growth for readers. (By the Inklings Cholewa-Purgal almost exclusively means Tolkien and Lewis, and by Le Guin she almost exclusively means the Earthsea series.) Other than this similarity, these books arrive from different literary realms: Cholewa-Purgal comes in at 381 pages, compared to Strachan and Coster's xvi + 69; Cholewa-Purgal refers to intellectual heavyweights such as Derrida, St. Augustine, and Frye, while Strachan and Coster refer to spiritual teachers such as Carlos Castaneda and the Bhagavad Gita; Cholewa-Purgal assumes comfort with vocabulary such as "postmodernism" and "aporia," while Strachan and Coster assume comfort with terms such as "ego consciousness" and "unconditioned self"; Cholewa-Purgal's writing is densely reasoned while Strachan and Coster's is light and airy. Cholewa-Purgal reaches her claim that reading Tolkien is psychotherapeutic in several steps: First, she draws connections between the Inklings' and Le Guin's concept of Faerie, and then reviews and agrees with literature establishing that these fantasists work from an ethos of meaning that stands against the despair and nihilism of modernism and postmodernism. Next she discusses Victor Frankl's logotherapy, a form of psychotherapy specifically focused on discovering existential meaning, and states that it similarly stands against despair and nihilism. She then claims that logotherapeutic gains can be achieved in the process of reading (bibliotherapy), especially when the reading resembles art therapy via ekphrasis (words being used to describe pictorial images). She thinks that the Inklings and Le Guin, with their ethos of meaning and ekphrastic writing, have stronger logotherapeutic effects than other forms of literature, and that the eucatastrophic elements of the Inklings' and Le Guin's writings are cathartically therapeutic. The choice of Le Guin out of the enormous field of fantasy writers as the "heiress" of the Inklings (49) is at least as reasonable as [End Page 230] any other choice, despite obvious differences such as Tolkien's focus on war and Le Guin's on gender roles, or the Inklings' Christianity and Le Guin's Taoist leanings. Alongside the whimsical link that Le Guin and Priscilla Tolkien had the same birth years, Cholewa-Purgal notes the similar ethos shared between Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories" and Le Guin's essays about fantasy, and the power of language in their fictional worlds. Other similarities I would add are their vivid worldbuilding and descriptions of nature, and Le Guin's exploration of death and loss of enchantment (well-known themes of Tolkien's), that come together poignantly when Ged expends all his magical power sealing the rift between the worlds of the dead and the living, leaving himself...