Arleen McCarty Hynes

After her marriage to Emerson Hynes, a professor at St. John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, she worked in the College of St. Benedict library. She and her husband hosted guests that included monks and visitors from St. John's, and they also brought together groups of Catholic artists, writers, and thinkers who were part of what was called "The Movement," including Dorothy Day, sculptor Don Humphrey, and J. F. and Betty Powers.[7] Powers called her husband Emerson "a fervent practitioner and leader in the Catholic rural- and family-life movements."[8] Arleen Hynes was part of the Catholic Rural Life Movement, the Liturgical Movement, and the Christian Family Movement, and she served a term as National Family Life Chair for the Council of Catholic Women.[9] As progressive Catholics they were both active in the Catholic Worker movement, and the Agrarian society.

1959, Democrat Eugene McCarthy (not to be confused with Republican Joseph McCarthy of the 1950s anticommunist hearings) was elected a Senator from Minnesota. Hynes's husband Emerson had gone to college at St. John's with McCarthy, and been the best man in his wedding. Emerson Hynes left a 20-year academic career to move the family to Washington and become McCarthy's legislative assistant.[10] They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and she served on the National Council on Aging, hosted a study group on Vatican II, and was president of the Virginia chapter of the American Association of University Women, producing an important study in 1962.[11]

McCarthy ran for president in 1968, and Arleen Hynes served as the head of Volunteers for McCarthy. Emerson Hynes retired in 1968 after McCarthy lost his bid to gain the US presidential nomination. Some speculated that enormous stress from the loss of their son, Michael, who drowned in the Potomac river in 1970 at age 18, may have weakened his health.[12] The failed campaign also took a toll, and the combination may have led to Emerson Hynes's first stroke, which happened at the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention.[13] Several more strokes followed, leaving Arleen Hynes a widow when Emerson died of a heart attack at age 56 in 1971, only six months after Michael died.

In 1970, shortly before her husband's anticipated death and at his urging, Hynes found work as a patient's librarian at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Southeast Washington, DC, the nation's only federal mental hospital.[14] They assigned her a room for the library that had formerly been the morgue. Although the library had existed since 1903 and was one of the earliest patient libraries in the country, it had no windows, only one skylight, and 10,000 uncatalogued books, with many piled high on the floor.[15]

She expanded the library's services to more than 100 patients a week out of a population of 4,000, launched a lecture series and movie screenings, and allowed patients to read in the library and listen to music.[16] She collected artwork that they could borrow to put in their rooms.[17] She began a program reading to patients who she said "had never been read to before," and the groups included people who had experienced homelessness, battered women, former felons, alcoholics, and drug addicts.[18]

She described a favorite group:

I did have a favorite group, Last Renaissance, in the drug program. They lived together and they were really street people who were severe drug addicts. They came over every Monday morning. I was very pleased because early on, in 1971, a patient in the Last Renaissance program came to me and said they’d heard I read poetry on Friday afternoons and asked if they could have a program for themselves. The group fluctuated from as high as thirty to down around fifteen. At first they wanted all poetry, but after a while a group member suggested looking at Erich Fromm’s Art of Loving. So I’d take a paragraph or two in to them and they’d 'cut it up,' that’s what they called it, and find the application to their lives.

It was a great group. I did it for ten years with whoever was in the program. I’ll always remember how the image that really struck them over and over was Narcissus. They’d sit there and literally look down at the floor and say 'yeah, yeah, I’d just look at myself and think what a sharp dude I was in my slick clothes. I didn’t care about my woman. I didn’t care about my kids, or my mother or my grandmother or anybody else when I was on drugs. All I cared about was me.'

They were excited and loved it. I think it speaks to the fact that almost everybody would like to use their minds given the opportunity to have people listen to them seriously. We were all really listening. Then I’d ask them to write and they’d write. Even though many had an eighth-grade education or less, they would write. Yes. That was the group I loved the best.[19]

Early forerunners of what she would codify and teach as bibliotherapy did exist, such as R. H. Schauffler's 1927 book The Poetry Cure: The Medicine Chest of Verse, Music and Picture, psychiatrist Smiley Blanton's 1960 The Healing Power of Poetry, or Dr. Jack Leedy's 1969 Poetry Therapy: The Use of Poetry in the Treatment of Emotional Disorders, among others.[20] Leedy's work inspired hers the most, and in the early 1970s, based on much of this work and more, she first founded the Bibliotherapy Roundtable, introducing the term widely and hosting lectures and readings.[21][22] She embarked on a 1,000-hour program of work, analysis, and study to become a registered poetry therapist. After completing her own supervised training, she trained another bibliotherapist who became the first in the federal system, and she established the first such position as a government job.[23]

She was engaged with patients' drug therapies, but asserted that a therapy based on books and reading could also be healing. As Patricia Lefevre wrote of an interview with Hynes,[24]

Once a man who had not spoken for years began relating to a poem, expressing a point of view. Another, who did not know his name and who had spent years staring at the ceiling, started to make relevant comments. Hynes began to witness the power of words to mend and watched as some of the sickest patients in the back wards got transferred onto 'looser' wards.[25]

However, none of the aforementioned books functioned as a comprehensive text, so her 1986 book was needed. She based it on a training program she launched in 1984, and her need for a text. After the book's publication, she and Dr. Kenneth Gorelick, head of psychiatric training, established the first training course in bibliotherapy, along with a certification program.[26] They worked closely with bibliotherapist Rosalie Brown, whom Hynes helped hire.[27]

After leaving her job at St. Elizabeth's in 1981, she returned to Minnesota to enter the Sisters of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, just a few miles from St. John's and Collegeville. She professed first vows on the Feast of St. Benedict, July 11, 1981, almost 10 years to the date since her husband's death, and perpetual vows on the same date in 1985.[28] For two decades she was a staffer and occasional instructor in the monastery Spirituality Center. She worked with battered women at a shelter, and with seniors and jail inmates. She is buried at St. Benedict's Monastery in Minnesota.[29]

• Hynes, Arleen McCarty; Gorelick, Kenneth (1986). Proceedings of the Fourth Bibliotherapy Round Table : January 28 and 29, 1977, Washington, D.C. Westview Press.
• Arleen McCarty Hynes, “Certification in the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Bibliotherapy Training Program,” in Rhea J. Rubin, Using Bibliotherapy: A Guide to Theory and Practice (Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1978), 201–12.
• Arleen McCarty Hynes, “Bibliotherapy in the Circulating Library at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital,” in Rhea J. Rubin (ed.), Bibliotherapy Source Book (Phoenix, Arizona: Oryx Press, 1978), 300–304.
• Arleen M. Hynes "The Goals of Bibliotherapy," Arts in Psychotherapy 7 (1980), 35–41.
• Arleen McCarty Hynes, "Poetry: An Avenue Into the Spirit," Journal of Poetry Therapy, 4:2, 1990, 71-81. doi=10.1007/bf01078545