Rethinking Therapeutic Reading. Kelda Green

accessed 20 March 2015.

8Tom J. Johnsen and Friberg Oddgeir, ‘The Effects of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy as an Anti-Depressive Treatment Is Falling: A Meta-Analysis’, Psychological Bulletin 141(4) (2015), pp. 747–68.

      Lars-Goran Ost, ‘Efficacy of the Third Wave of Behavioural Therapies: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 46 (2008), 296–321.

9Evans, p. 11.

10Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 2.

11Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Senecan Drama and Stoic Cosmology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 8; hereafter cited as ‘Rosenmeyer’.

12T. S. Eliot, ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, in Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 3–55 (p. 3).

13Brad Inwood, Reading Seneca: Stoic Philosophy at Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), pp. 5–6.

14Epistles, i, XXXIII, p. 237.

15Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Thyestes’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 43–96 (p. 81); hereafter cited as Thyestes.

16Ibid., p. 66.

17Rosenmeyer, p. 107.

18Ibid., p. 111.

19Thyestes, p. 87.

20Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Phaedra’, in Four Tragedies and Octavia, trans. E. F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), pp. 97–152 (p. 108).

21Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Hercules’, in Eight Tragedies, trans. John G. Fitch, The Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), i, pp. 36–159 (p. 101); hereafter cited as Hercules.

22Ibid., p. 157.

23Ibid., p. 153.

24Emily Wilson, The Greatest Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 181.

25Epistles, i, VIII, 37.

26Ibid., i, VIII, 39.

27Ibid., i, VIII, 38.

28Ibid., ii, LXVIII, 49.

29Ibid., i, XIII, 75.

30Lucilius Annaeus Seneca, ‘Consolation to Helvia’, in On the Shortness of Life, trans. C. D. N. Costa (London: Penguin, 2004), pp. 34–67 (p. 34); hereafter cited as Helvia.

31Ibid., p. 37.

32Hercules, p. 65.

33Helvia, p. 67.

34Ibid., p. 42.

35Ibid., pp. 45–46.

       Chapter 2

       THERAPY AND THE ESSAY: MONTAIGNE, AFTER SENECA

      A Case History

The French aristocrat Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) devoted himself to public service as a magistrate, counsellor and Mayor of Bordeaux during the period of political and religious upheaval in France marked by the civil war that raged intermittently from 1562 to 1598. In 1571 – at the age of 38 – Montaigne retired from public life, set up a library in the tower of his chateaux, and focused on studying ancient philosophy and writing a book of essays. Montaigne was a particularly keen student of Seneca and was described by his contemporary, Estienne Pasquier as ‘another Seneca in our language’.¹ The first half of this chapter will examine Montaigne as a reader of Seneca, considering how he put the principles of Stoicism into practice, testing them against the reality of his own experiences and adapting them to better serve and suit himself. As he wrote in the essay ‘On Some Lines of Virgil’, ‘My philosophy lies in action.’² The second half of the chapter examines whether Montaigne’s Essays offer up a particular model of self-help, concluding that they do contain a valuable therapeutic model, but one which is distinctly different from conventional modern self-help therapy.

Montaigne’s self-enforced retirement followed the example of Seneca who had himself retired from his public role as advisor to the Roman Emperor Nero towards the end of his life and who, in retirement, had written his series of letters to Lucilius. In these epistles, Seneca had advised his friend to follow his lead and ‘withdraw into yourself, as far as you can’.³ As Montaigne retreated to his library he was trying to put Seneca’s advice into practice: ‘It seemed to me then that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness, caring for itself, concerned only with itself, calmly thinking of itself’.’⁴ However, in reality he found himself struggling to achieve anything close to the Stoic ideal of tranquillity, as his mind immediately ‘bolted off like a runaway horse’.⁵ The discordancy between the Stoic theory of retirement and Montaigne’s own lived experience was an early indication for him that philosophy was something that had to be made and moulded afresh by each individual through the act of living. It was mental and not public action to which his retirement was dedicated.

      Writing in