2018 literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk on what health means to her, how literature and mental health are connected, and what she learned from working as a psychologist.

Before your literary career, you worked as a psychologist. What brought about your interest in psychology?

– My interest in psychology came from literature. It was books, novels, that opened my eyes to our whole, enormous mental world, to the diversity of reactions to this world, to suffering, and to a sense of alienation.

A “foundational” book, if I can put it that way, for my interest in psychology was one I read at secondary school. It was Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud, which is about psychoanalysis. This approach to psychology fascinated me. I realised that culture is the art of interpretation, and psychoanalysis brings this tool to perfection and, most importantly, encourages us to think in a multifaceted way.

I admit that I was more interested in the theory of psychology than in working with people.

Your psychology studies took place during a historic and chaotic time in Poland’s history with the Solidarity movement and a country on strike against the communist authorities. The militia patrolled Warsaw, and you’ve written that you could see how badly the situation was affecting the patients. How close would you say a country’s ‘state of health’ is connected to the state of health among the citizens?

– It definitely is connected. I also think something like a “collective character” is formed, societies vary according to the traumas they’ve experienced, the wars lost and won, the political and economic systems.

Moral or religious tradition also exerts a certain pressure on us and affects our mentality. In history I’m fascinated by so-called longue durée  – it’s a concept that describes long-term historical processes that shape not just the spirit of the times, but also the spirit of the collective. How we cope with a crisis, whether we have a sense of our own collective value, our own identity and so on.

When I was growing up and reaching maturity, my country was in a deplorable state in terms of politics and economics. The level of fear and uncertainty about the future was very high. I think there was a sort of collective depression in the air. But people sought help from each other. Maybe that’s how Solidarity came into being. This way of gathering together, searching for community, and supporting each other proved to be the source of great political changes.

What were the most important things you learnt from working in psychology?

– To listen to people carefully, to hear how they regard their personal history. Psychology also taught me that there are many ways of looking at the same thing. Sometimes they can be harmonised, but in some cases they are impossible to coordinate. This can be an asset, but also a curse. Reality is something that’s constantly being coordinated, a story that’s forming before our eyes, and that can be torn up and re-shaped, depending on our need.

Your interest in psychology is reflected in your writing, for example in your novel E.E. How much influence has your interest in psychology had in your writing?

– Writing and psychology are not in opposition. It’s more like a continuum. Both of them explore our inner world and its projection on the outer world. This is the essence of literature, as I see it. Many writers have this approach without having had to study psychology at all.

Can writing improve one’s mental health, and if so, how?

– I think literature is a great therapist. Not just because it distracts us from our current problems, from overstimulation and chaos, but above all because it broadens our consciousness. After every book we read we are greater, with a wider range, we understand and feel more.

Literature, most of all the novel, teaches us empathy and appeals to our empathy. How else could we understand the motivation of the central characters? Here we have a unique opportunity to get away from ourselves, to become someone else for a while and to look at the world through their eyes.

This rare experience releases us from the burden of our own selves in a very safe way – I think it can be a particularly valuable experience for young people in the process of maturing – but it also enriches us by showing us things that by reason of time and place we wouldn’t be able to experience. So literature builds a sort of subtle psychological community that transcends language or culture, and also passports, and is such an effective vector of ideas that the great might envy it.

What we include in the term ‘health’ probably differs between people. What does ‘health’ mean to you?

– I understand health to be a state of inner and outer harmony that opens us up to fellow feeling with the world, to the effects of the environment, and to contact with other living creatures, in a mental and physical sense. In a spiritual sense it means broadening one’s consciousness, even at the cost of suffering.

We should understand mental health in a relational way – not as an individual state, but as the capacity to participate in a network of exchange, give and take.

Olga Tokarczuk took part in the 2024 Nobel Week Dialogue on the ‘Future of Health’. Learn more about the event