REMEDY BOOKS

“ONCE UPON A TIME AND ONCE MORE.
TALES TO BE CHILDREN AGAIN AND BECOME ADULTS.”

This website is dedicated to Arianna, a little girl who once told me: 
“imagination is like the immune system”. 

Her illness had confined her to bed. And she read and imagined. She had a wisdom to know which book was right for everyone. I read with her. I read the books she was reading, or that she had just read. It was a way of being close to her. 

Thanks to her, REMEDY BOOKS was born.
Now my wish is to share them with adults and children.

Imagination is sick 

From my clinical experience with children and adults, I have been able to see for myself that imagination is in a deep crisis today, and this is dangerous because it makes us less free and less human.
Not only do children no longer know how to play, they hardly read anymore, but they say that it is tiring and takes too much time. They play with smart phones.
When they stop they feel empty. They are bored.

We live in a time, as Italo Calvino says in The Six Memos for the Next Millennium “in which a fundamental human faculty is being lost: the power to focus visions with eyes closed, to think in images.”

It is a time when, on the one hand, we are submerged by idol or rubbish images and, on the other, we are invaded by a hypertrophy of the disembodied word.
A word that explains and does not reveal. A flat word.
Not a word that is a presence and a place fostering imagination. 
The bombardment of external images to which children are subjected, atrophies the imagination and the production of images that emerge from the psyche. 

“Imagination is like the immune system”.

Not having the ability to imagine is like not having an immune system capable of metabolizing experience, especially the negative. Not being able to transform - as Hegel said - the negative into life.
Imagination is a way to be able to face life's challenges, fear and death. 
Imagination allows a change of view, and therefore the possibility of finding solutions.
I deeply believe in the therapeutic value of the imagination - as an organ of sense and perception - and of the gaze that can facilitate these dimensions. 

(Stocchi I., Il Gioco della Sabbia nella Terapia con i Bambini. La Pazienza dello Sguardo, Biblioteca Vivarium, 2018)

I think, as Hillman says, that “we are all patients of the imagination”. 

How to reawaken and heal an immune system that has become sick and atrophied? 
Play can be a remedy and a cure. And so can be reading. 

Why can books and reading be a remedy?
Reading encourages the experience of letting our images emerge.
The book invites us to listen and emphasizes the inner images, those that are inside us.
For this to be possible, there must be an encounter between the book and the child's experience.
Finding the right book for each individual child means initiating them into their inner world and imagination. Helping them to become passionate about reading.
So, less video games and more books.

 The time to which the book introduces us is different from that of the video game. 
It is a time - like that of the symbolic game - that is slower. It lasts in time.

 Traditional fairy tales have always used images and metaphors to tell us about the challenges of life and growing up. In recent years, children's literature has taken up these challenges through new stories and tales in which the moods that accompany the stages of growth and the resources needed to face life's challenges are very clearly described: fear, sadness, anger, grief, death, love, friendship, imagination...

These modern-day tales and stories can help us talk about what we cannot say, and can help adults find the words to communicate to children, and become a healing tool for adults and children alike.

Iolanda Stocchi, born in Venice in 1961.
Jungian psychologist and psychotherapist, she has been working with adults and children in Milan for twenty-five years.
She combines analytical work through words with Sand Play.

She has published several essays in the Rivista di Psicologia Analitica, the book Il Silenzio delle Sirene. Figurazioni della psiche femminile, Biblioteca Vivarium, 2005, the book Il Gioco della Sabbia nella terapia con i bambini. La Pazienza dello Sguardo, Biblioteca Vivarium”, 2018, and the updated re-edition Il Silenzio delle Sirene. Se il maschile non ascolta il canto. Dal Romanico al Gioco della Sabbia, Biblioteca Vivarium, 2019.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Lidia Moiola and Valentina Zucca, for making the creation and publication of this site possible with their work and helpfulness.