Move over Freud: literary fiction is the best therapy

Fiction breaks down social isolation and creates a sense of belonging, argues the author and former psychoanalyst

One of my maxims as a university teacher of literature was: "A great novel not only enhances our understanding - more crucially it understands us." When I later trained as a psychoanalyst I annoyed my tutors with my refrain that one could learn more about the subtleties of human psychology from literature than from the works of Freud, Adler or Jung. This was not to decry the pioneering wisdoms of those great psychologists, but years of teaching literature convinced me that fiction trumps theory in its illumination of the hidden recesses of our consciousness.

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