ABSTRACT
This chapter presents four main goals of the bibliotherapist works to help the participants achieve. The goals are improve the capacity to respond by stimulating and enriching mental images and concepts, increase self-understanding by helping individuals value their own personhood and become more knowledgeable, increase awareness of interpersonal relationships and improve reality orientation. Improving the capacity to respond is a wide-ranging goal that involves stimulating and enriching the participant's images, concepts, and/or feeling-responses to the bibliotherapeutic materials and to life in general. Scheduled bibliotherapy sessions in which basic, reality-oriented responses are expected and achieved create such an opportunity. In fact, bibliotherapy often involves some kind of helpful working out of memories. The process of going over memories in the context of a bibliotherapy discussion is therapeutic in many ways. Bibliotherapy seems to offer a particularly safe environment for developing the capacity to express opinions.
