The Development of Contemporary Literary Therapy Genre Yen-Chi Huang Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium Taking its starting point from a critical dialogue with literary therapy writings and psychoanalytic theories, this paper explores thematic development and representation of psychoanalysis and therapeutic experience in contemporary literary therapy genre. To begin with, it is often considered that literature reflects the zeitgeist of an epoch. From the case of how different types of literary genres have developed within their specific epochs, one can reflect such developmental process from historical, sociological and literary perspectives. In the case of literary therapy genre, when it comes to its origin, we have to consider the historical development of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and how this development is documented in different literary forms throughout the time. Because the development of literary therapy genre and the public reception of psychiatry and psychoanalysis are very often synchronized, how this genre transforms from early form of objective medical documentation to the contemporary diverse literary therapy genre demonstrates an important shift of zeitgeist of psychoanalysis and literature. Furthermore, in the last decades, with the change of public reception and popularity of psychoanalysis, the contemporary forms of literary therapy writings also have changed. In contemporary literature, we have seen many different types of works which focus on the subject of psychoanalysis or therapeutic experience. Nevertheless, how literary therapy genre has been generated and evolved and finally comes to its own has not been fully researched by scholars so far. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate this shift of conceptualizing psychoanalysis in contemporary literary therapy genre. In order to define the manifold of the literary corpus, I premise my argument that after the gradual-changing process in psychotherapy methods and pharmaceutical revolution along with the popularity of psychoanalytic notions in contemporary culture, the infrastructure of literary therapy genre also diversifies. In addition to the emergence of different writing strategies, more and more new therapeutic issues are also covered in contemporary literary therapy genre. Therefore, we start to describe contemporary forms and components of literary therapy genre by following questions: (1)What is the definition of literary therapy genre? (2) How can psychoanalytic concepts be theorized in literary therapy genre? (3) How this genre is shaped and generated via varied thematic forms? And what is the targeted audience of the genre? I will focus on literary therapy writings written by both analysts and analysands about psychoanalytic experiences from the 1990s to the present by authors 1
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