When a Text Becomes a Mirror: Transference and Projection in Bibliotherapy

On the Unique Process That Takes Place in the Encounter with Literature

There are moments in therapy, in classrooms, and in bibliotherapy groups, when two people read the same text and seem to encounter two entirely different stories.

One reader focuses on abandonment, another on freedom.One is touched by the mother in the story, another can hardly tolerate her presence.Someone remembers a sentence for years, while another forgets it immediately.

At first glance, this may seem obvious. After all, we are different people, with different histories and sensitivities. Yet in bibliotherapy, these differences are not viewed merely as “opinions” or “interpretations.” They are often understood as part of a deeper psychological process taking place between the reader and the text.

In this sense, a literary text is never entirely fixed. It changes according to the person reading it, the moment in life in which it is encountered, and the emotional world brought into the reading.

The same story may become comforting at one stage of life and unbearable at another.

The Israeli literature scholar Rachel Tzoran once described literature as a kind of “projective screen” onto which readers unconsciously cast parts of themselves. In psychodynamic language, we might say that reading often involves processes related to projection, transference, identification, resistance, longing, and defense.

This does not mean that readers simply “invent” meanings inside a text. Rather, something more delicate occurs: the text and the inner world begin to interact.

Sometimes the encounter is immediate and emotional.Sometimes the text remains distant, almost closed.And sometimes a reader feels strangely understood by a story that was never written specifically for them.

In bibliotherapy groups, this process becomes especially visible.

A poem is read aloud.Silence follows.Then one participant speaks about grief, another about childhood, another about anger. Occasionally, participants are surprised by each other’s responses. “Were we listening to the same poem?” someone asks.

But perhaps this is precisely the point.

The literary text creates a shared space, while still allowing each participant to meet something deeply personal within it. In this way, literature can hold both intimacy and distance simultaneously. The story is “not about me,” and yet it somehow is.

This dual movement is part of what makes literature psychologically powerful.

The poet Sylvia Plath explored this idea beautifully in her poem Mirror. The mirror in the poem describes itself as

truthful and exact, yet what unfolds in the poem is far more emotional than objective reflection. The mirror becomes a place onto which fear, aging, identity, and longing are projected.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

In bibliotherapy, texts sometimes function in a similar way. They do not merely “reflect” the reader. They participate in a psychological encounter with them.

This may also explain why certain books arrive into our lives at very particular moments.

A novel we ignored at twenty suddenly becomes meaningful at forty. A children’s story returns years later with unexpected emotional force. A poem once experienced as abstract begins to feel painfully intimate.

The text has not changed. But the reader has.

And perhaps this is one of the reasons literature continues to accompany human beings across cultures and generations. Not only because stories entertain or educate us, but because they allow us to encounter parts of ourselves indirectly, symbolically, and sometimes more safely than direct conversation would allow.

In psychodynamic bibliotherapy, we listen carefully not only to the text itself, but also to the relationship forming around it:

Why was this sentence remembered? Why was this character rejected? Why did the ending create relief in one reader and anger in another?

These questions are not separate from the reading experience.

They are part of it.

And perhaps this is why literature can sometimes become more than literature.

At certain moments, a story becomes a mirror.

In our training in psychodynamic bibliotherapy, we continue exploring how stories become emotional and symbolic spaces for readers