Scriptotherapy: Therapeutic Writing as a Counseling Adjunct

Major perspectives concerning the use of writing in counseling are given, with the goal of clarifying the nature of what has proved to be a useful but vague and poorly defined technique. This article reviews the practice of what this author calls “scriptotherapy” and cites examples. Practitioners and researchers have tended to avoid the problem of defining scriptotherapy or establishing guidelines for its use, perhaps because systematic empirical research that supports the value of therapeutic writing has been lacking. Drawing, however, from the increasing flow of both anecdotal and controlled studies that point to the specific benefits of writing, the author proposes recommendations for the use of scriptotherapy.