(June 19, 2012)

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For two decades I have been noting the need for Morenean methods to be recognized as applying to arenas far beyond the medical model, the context of psychotherapy (Blatner, 2007). (See other papers on this website, e.g., Applications of Moreno's Methods in the 21st Century):
    
Psychodrama may be applied that way, to be sure, but there are thousands of articles and hundreds of books that speak to that application---see the international psychodrama bibliography on-line.

This paper is an intellectual supplement to a workshop being given next week at the British Psychodrama Association's annual conference. The point here builds on and extends my claim, recently amplified: Psychodrama as a general term for a category that includes sociodrama, action methods in group psychotherapy, applications in non-clinical contexts, and so forth, in turn belongs to a more encompassing category that I call Action Explorations---one that includes parallel efforts to weave in improvisational enactment into education and business. The point here is simply that there have been a good many innovations within our field, some of which will be listed. (I invite readers to email me at adam@blatner.com and send me suggestions for additions or corrections!) There have also been efforts at integrating our approach with a variety of other approaches both within and beyond the context of psychotherapy.

For those in the field of psychodrama, this reaching beyond the context of psychotherapy is nothing new. Moreno began the second and most productive phase of his career with the writing (in 1934) of his first book on sociometry, Who Shall Survive? and the book begins with this line: "A truly therapeutic method should have as its goal nothing less than the whole of mankind." His meaning here is simply that Moreno envisioned this as being much more encompassing than merely the context of psychiatry, the treatment of mental illness. Because that was the rising star economically, Moreno followed that trend, promoting also the activity of group psychotherapy. But his vision transcended the clinical context and within the next decade he was experimenting with action explorations in schools and organizations.

Psychiatry itself has become somewhat problematic, retreating in the 1970s to a position that partook more of "hard science," and then under the pressures of "managed care" and the new discoveries and subsidies of the pharmacology industry, reduced to medication management. Some few psychiatrists have spoken out against this trend, but as a whole, the specialty within medicine has suffered, as has much else of the profession, from the cultural pressures of economics and scientism (that word referring to the tendency to believe that science can describe reality---a belief that I consider a little true and largely illusory.)

So this paper is aimed at noting the dynamism of the field of psychodrama, that it needs to be better integrated with other fields, and that it is also alive with a number of its own innovations.

Integrations & Synthesis

    One of the themes of this conference is integrating, and one innovation I’ll present for you consideration is the very simple idea that the various core elements in psychodrama can be rationally integrated. This synthesis makes the field more dynamically coherent. Some have decried the lack of theory and I hereby actively disagree. I think there is a profound and compelling theory behind the practice of psychodrama—and beyond psychodrama—this rationale applies to many forms of what I call action explorations—spontaneity training, organizational development using sociometry, community work using sociodrama, many aspects of the more improvisational types of drama therapy, and so forth.

The rationale is simple. When two modalities can be intelligently integrated, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the principle of holism in systems theory. An orchestra is greater than a mere assemblage of instruments even when combined with the players. The piece is composed for the parts to play off of each other, the effects magnify each other.  So too the different tools of the gardener, the carpenter, the surgeon.

Psychodrama as a Synthesis

Morenian methods and other types of action explorations work because they're a synthesis. When writing became printing, or printing became mass newspapers; when telegraph became radio or radio and moving pictures became television, these were examples in which technologies were synthesizing new hybrids and each generated innumerable new forms. So, too, when talking about things gets combined with improvisationally enacting them, discussion with role playing, a new especially dynamic form of discourse is generated. In other words, synthesizing several principles or methods results in a symbiotic acceleration of power, more than the mere sum of the parts. A single organism is more adaptive because it can do more different functions, and this is true also of a method. In the case of Moreno's methods of sociodrama or psychodrama or role playing, often there is the power of synthesis of the following elements:
  - Creativity as an ethos, a value, a general direction, a dynamic that needs to be valued. It wasn't much in the past.
  - Spontaneity as a spirit, an attitude, warming-up to opening to creative inspiration, an expectation that creative possibilities will emerge.
  - Improvisation implements the attitude of spontaneity; it is a technique, experimentation, making a laboratory, allowing repeated tries within a context of social and (usually) relative physical safety.
  - Play allows for improvisations to be repeated, given time, varied, explored. More attention is given to the process and the need to get to an imagined goal is relaxed.Play integrates the spirit of safety, lubricating the interplay of all the other elements.
  - Group as a context, a collaboration, role-distribution (each person doing what s/he does best) and other group dynamics multiply this process.
  - Reiteration and Feedback as a principle, fits with improvisation, cybernetics, self-correcting,
  - Drama as a frame: story in action. The natural way to explore the psycho-social realm.It's better than trying to understand human interactions through dry scientific experiments (too indirect) or abstract theorizing, or just using words to discuss.
   - The “stage” is the locus for experiments, while “off-stage” is the locus for discussion, re-thinking, re-planning. A formal theatrical stage isn't necessary, but it does help to demarcate physical areas for both functions
  - Role as a language, a multi-leveled, user-friendly terminology that works well with drama and the other elements
  - Imagination as content, what-if, exploring other alternatives, using the fore-brain. It generates "surplus reality," offers possible avenues for creative thinking, expressiveness, and other advantages that cannot be accessed in “real life.” (This is another advantage of drama—such explorations into imagination are recognized as something that’s done in this cultural frame.)
  - Action Techniques as tools, different kinds of toys that alter levels of disclosure, time, viewpoints, degrees of reality / imagination; these techniques are the equivalent to the different kinds of chemicals and equipment in the laboratory, only they’re not “things” but methods, ways of exploring creative possibilities.
     ... and so forth.
In one sense, there is a logical sequence here. From another viewpoint, each element supports the others.
Visually, I picture a mandala composed of nine overlapping circles (wth a tenth element in the middle), and this geometric structure can fold in multiple dimensions, allowing for the synergy of the aforementioned elements.

Another synthesis: Thought + Communication + Empathy + Support + Bringing Others Forth + Consciousness- Facilitation + Creative Problem Diagnosis and Solution, + the above tools. Note the inclusion of the emotional and social support. The idea that we should be grown up enough, strong enough to not need the approval and encouragement of others, is a reflection of a hyper-individualistic world-view. Don't baby people. This was taken to cruel lengths by "behaviorist" psychologists in the 1920s who assumed the mantle of "scientific knowledge." The sensible baby and child care books of Dr. Benjamin Spock (not the Mr. Spock of Star Trek) were popular in the later 1940s because they appealed to the mother's instinct to pick up her child when it cried. Duh. The point here is that there are still residues of shame for needing others' support, and this cultural background accounts for a thin but definite layer that adds to personal vulnerability and psychopathology in our culture.

So the point I'm making is that our shared experience of reality has all those other hardly-conscious dimensions. What is seen on the surface is a fraction of what’s going on underneath. The shorthand of conversation only points to (and often disguises) what else is going on. We’re trying to do politics (interpersonal, intra-psychic) with half of the data. The other half—or three-fourths—is repressed and /or oppressed, pushed away from awareness. The point I'm making is that it’s useful to learn how to integrate this dimension.Medicine has continued to integrate the findings of relevant outside sciences and technologies, and that is accepted as natural. The idea that, for example, bacteriology is something apart from medicine, is today ludicrous. (It wasn't two hundred years ago! Indeed, microscopy and bacteriology was hardly known to exist.) In a contrasting social institution, religion, the opposite trend has been painfully apparent: One religion or sect claims absolute truth in an either-or fashion: They seem to say, "Our truth is so for all people in all eras and other beliefs are not only false, but wicked or at least misleading." (I should say that at present there are a good number of more inclusive and non-dogmatic trends in and beyond the purview of many more liberal religious institutions, but on the whole, alas, these are still minority voices.)

Psychiatry for a time was (alas) more like religion than medicine, in part due to Freud's own tendency to pathologize and condemn those who would presume to diverge too much for his tastes from his own views of the nature of the mind. Once Adler and Jung were seen as deviations, the field became a bit more like religions arguing over points of relative orthodoxy. Around the 1970s this trend began to reverse and voices that advocated eclecticism and integration gradually became more dominant. The medical profession for reasons mentioned above retreated and left the enterprise of psychotherapy increasingly in the hands of psychologists and other mental health professionals.

In another development, though, the ethos of the psychotherapy of the not-too-sick---which accounted for the majority of the incomes of the majority of psychiatrists---evolved also towards the next step: Helping the relatively healthy become even healthier, more vital. This was the "human potential movement." (A review of the history of psychotherapy has been posted elsewhere on this website.) So one arena of integration is the extension of methods for bringing people forth into the endeavor of promoting personal development.

A related extension of this trend has been the extension of "social and emotional learning" into the schools. Indeed, role playing has been part of education for many years---some developed by people who never heard of Moreno, some directly from Morenian roots. Recent trends in addressing of violence, shootings in schools, bullying, sexual pressures, drug abuse, and so forth have generated many organizations that attend to the challenges of promoting "social intelligence." (My own bias is that applied role theory---a refinement of Moreno's ideas I've been creating for a few decades, using also others' ideas such as those from the Australian-New Zealand psychodrama culturs---offers a user-friendly language that could make this goal more accessible. Also, action methods and forms of experiential learning will further enhance the project of promoting emotional intelligence in youngsters.)

Innovations

Since Moreno's death in 1974---and even before that---his followers have been extending his methods---often beyond Moreno's awareness or interest. I give him credit for enormous energy in presenting what he had to say, persistence, publishing, presenting internationally and nationally, etc. No one can do everything. But we should recognize that there has been much more in this field besides Moreno. Here are some and I am open to your making suggestions for additions:
   - Kate Hudgins and Francesca Toscani have developed a method called "Therapeutic Spiral Method" (TSM), and written about it extensively, as well as having presented internationally and spread the word. Indeed, they have a new anthology due out soon.
   - Adam & Allee Blatner took psychodrama out of therapy and into the domain of recreation, pure fun, spontaneity and imagination development, naming this modified approach "The Art of Play."
    - Susan Aaron, Jean Campbell, the late Ildri Ginn and others have integrated psychodrama with the best of somatic psychotherapy---"body work"--- especially drawing on the insights and methods of Alexander Lowen ("Bioenergetic Analysis"), who drew on the pioneering work in the 1930s of Wilhelm Reich. Others such as Stanley Keleman, Ken Dychtwald, John Pierrakos, etc. have extended these ideas.
   - Connie Miller, Natalie Winters, Saphira Linden and others have applied Morenian ideas in the direction of transpersonal psychology, spiritual work.
   - Tom Treadwell and others have integrated cognitive therapy with psychodrama.
   - etc. Awaiting your suggestions!
Integrations Beyond Psychotherapy
- Creativity studies and the work of Arieti, Csikszentmihalyi, etc.
- A theology of immanence—that’s what Moreno’s underlying philosophy is—and there have been a number of others who have also said it, in some ways better. Moreno, though, sought to actually develop methods for promoting this sensibility.
 - Revision of theatre to be more ritual, more involving, more people rediscovering their own creativity rather than simply witnessing what others come up with
 - A pluralistic and more socially-embedded psychology, role theory
 - Methods for exploring and deepening our ways of relating, considering that more social psychology (i.e.-sociometry)
 - Applying creativity, role, drama in education, businss, community building, law, police work, medical education, experiential learning

Other forms:
   Drama in Education, Theatre in Education
      Social theatre, mental health players, Theatre of the Oppressed
   Expressive therapies, other creative arts therapies
   Drama therapy and drama beyond therapy
   Group dynamics, self-help groups, business and teamwork, collaboration for creativity and innovation at work
   Improvisation in Business and organizations, “Applied Improvisation”
   Play Therapy with Kids
 

A Method for Consciousness-Expansion

I use the term "action explorations" as the name for a category that includes not only psychodrama and sociodrama and other Morenian methods, but other types of experiential learning that involve a degree of dramatic enactment---including drama in education, improvisation and spontaneity training in business and organizations, bibliodrama, many parts of drama therapy, and so forth. These methods utilize the principles mentioned above.

The expansion alluded to consists of bringing into explicit consciousness and group awareness thoughts and feelings that had in the past remained for the most part unexpressed. There are many feelings, impressions, attitudes, and so forth that remain at a level somewhere between explicitly conscious and that which is truly repressed and unconscious---i.e., in a vast arena of the "pre-conscious." This consists of:
 - thoughts that registered in consciousness but were pushed away because they were
      - incompatible with one's sense of what was okay to think or feel
      - impossible to conceive of or imagine, having no other associations upon which to link or perch
  - feelings and attitudes that never found words for expression (this is a very big set of phenomena)
  - mixed elements---thoughts "I shouldn't be feeling" and so are ignored.

What makes such thoughts pre-conscious rather than unconscious is that when one hears others articulate the thought or express the feeling, there's a sense of resonance, "Oh, yes, that's what I'm feeling, too!" or "So, that is what I've been feeling!" These can be feelings of excitement and interests or fears, worries, shame, guilt, and resentments that had not yet reached consciousness. When other people can disclose such feelings or through the use of the double technique help one to realize that is what is being felt, there's a mild catharsis of discovery---an "aha!" experience.

Occasionally a small opening my lead to a deeper set of associations to other feelings, rage, grief, fear, etc., as one is literally re-minded of what had been kept bottled up. This leads to more dramatic catharses---again, a recognition and re-owning, "I didn't know I felt that deeply before."

Beyond the Individual

Consciousness-expansion can also involve information, categories, perspective that had truly never before been considered. Meetings with people from other cultures, travel and recognition that things can be done very differently, new trends in culture that had hardly been known about fifty years ago, and so forth---all relate to this process of opening to---or fighting against---new complexes of information, attitude, associated ethical or social problems, and so forth. This is good material for sociodrama or axiodrama---the latter word, axiodrama, relating to the re-evaluation via role playing methods of values and words that had not previously been recognized as having different meanings or interpretations. This is not academic quibbling, but a call to address themes that have been elusive in the past. (Alternatively, one might just see the whole process as good---what we believe---versus what "they" cling to in their limited superstiton. However that ol' we are right and they are wrong type of thinking isn't adaptive in a more complex world anymore.

Hearing it From Others

A poet I encountered when I was about 20 had a line in a poem that struck a chord?
    But if there is a proud grief of barriers, and no man may rise to another’s being,
          What then for all men and words?
The art of observation in medicine is knowing what to look for. The art of empathy is hearing with a deeper ear—and the more you develop your sensitivity to the kinds of things people are not saying, the better you’ll be as both double and director.

People want to be known, but they also are afraid to know themselves. So when they hear someone else say that which resonates with that which is yet unspoken in their minds and hearts, that opens them a bit. This is what some ritual and some theatre and some poetry does.

We want to be known by people we believe will care about us compassionately. We don’t even know we want this, we almost dare not ask for it. It isn’t common that this level of encounter happens. Moreno glimpsed it with his image of encounter, but for me to look at you with your eyes is a bit of an art. Moreno was intuitive, but not deeply kind nor considerate. Carl Rogers was closer to the mark here with his authentic way of being and his doctrine of unconditional positive regard.

But I can’t afford to be empathic in general—the world is too full of spammers and scammers. In a group where we symmetrically disclose, and there is no particular agenda other than personal development and helping a group grow that offers support to each other—more in the spirit of some early religious communities— well, there’s more of a chance. We’re mixing that frame with a technology of empathy.

The key to empathy is imagination, what’s it like to be in that predicament. It can be practiced. It doesn’t need to be perfectly accurate, but the more you do it, and let people correct you in your doing of it, the better you get. This workshop will take off on people rising to another’s being.

Can you experience being really understood? That’s the challenge we weave into the core of what we do. We do this using the tools of drama, and ourselves as improvisational script-writers of a sort. Given a person and a predicament, we warm up: What would it be like to be?

Now here’s the trick. We mix that activity with cybernetics—we ask for feedback: Is it this way? A bit, but also that. Aha, and we re-formulate, take it in. My wife said that a good actor takes direction well. If the director says, more this or less that, we adjust our intuition—not only our behavior, but our take on the situation so that it would be authentic to behave more this or less that. We get into the role deeper, and allow the other to ongoingly fertilize our creativity.

The other person gives guidance, yes, that’s it, or no, not that way. We shun pride and open to getting on the other’s wavelength. The game is not to impose our hypothesis—that is still pride in being clever—but rather to open again and again to what feels so for the other person. Now we’re doing empathy. It’s a skill, just like swimming, and you can get the knack. But part of this skill is getting pride out of the way. Listening, imagining.
It has been observed that the mind is a social organ. While there are writers who seem to operate in the relatively thin air of personal opinion, most people need to hear themselves think, interact a bit with others who share similar concerns. There is something deeply validating about encountering other people who resonate with your thinking. They may offer different re-frames, but still they seem to be at least in part in the same "camp."

In other words, the group process is very important as an aid to many if not most people. Even just writing one's thoughts and impressions down in a journal or knowing that what is said is heard by others and it makes sense to them---all this is is part of the process of bringing it from implicit to explicit consciousness: Someone else is witness, so what has been said cannot be again “taken back.”

(A fair amount of social life in the past has depended on tacit agreements, unspoken traditions of leaving some things unsaid, nor even thought. Psychodrama offers a context for really looking at discomforts and congestions in the social field.)

The logo is of a brain, composed of gears, which, if they were to turn, are so placed that the gears would jam up. This is an example of how our own minds are kluge jobs, not always perfectly organized for the modern world. Really, our instincts and basic reaction patterns evolved more for our prehistoric ancestors, and part of modern psychology involves learning how to channel and tame these old reaction patterns so they work harmoniously, they can be integrated, with contemporary life.

The problem is that contemporary life is crazy, ranging over a number of different world-views or paradigms that are shifting as we speak. Many of you were raised in a world where, for example, there seemed to be answers. Moreno called this the cultural conserve. Your job was to learn those answers, by memorizing them. Then you’d be okay. This was religion and school and politics. Trouble was—well there are several troubles:

First, the answers were taught by teachers who were themselves taught by their teachers and the updating of world-view was incomplete—so you may have spend many years picking up the latent expectations of grandparents, their worldviews, modified perhaps less than it was needed, by your parents and teachers and ministers and all.

One thing that with a few exceptions, perhaps, you did not learn was how to be creative, or how to differentiate good creativity from making trouble or seeming to be impudent or insufficiently respectful of your betters. But all this is now being reversed. We need to be competitive with the rising economies of China and India and other parts of the world, and we need to do this by becoming creative, innovative, and how do you do that?
Moreno showed us a way. First, he gave use many great tools, and I think he was great. But in the spirit of creativity, one must re-think, re-evaluate, and nothing—not even Moreno—can become a cultural conserve that can be or should be relied on. Moreno was prescient, he foresaw much, but he did it through eyes that were themselves conditioned by his own time and his own peculiar character structure. So we are charged with the task of not relying on his cultural conserve—which means to take what is useful and not what is not. Do not idealize—idealizing being attributing virtues not in evidence based on other virtues in evidence. Do not idolize. Build upon. Revise. Question. So Moreno was not all perfect. He annoyed a lot of people, made enemies, and it wasn’t always the other folks’ fault.

Still, I credit him with some remarkably good ideas. First, he made creativity the core value, theoretically, philosophically, even mythically. I think this was a good move for our time, and that in this he was fifty to a hundred years ahead of his time. Second, Moreno was interested in the how to, the converting of theory into application, and turned to the methodology that generated spontaneity.

Spontaneity as I see it is the mental attitude, improvisation is the activity as manifest in the world. You become more spontaneous, you do improvisation. Thoughts, feelings, actions.

So what we’re talking about is a technology for optimizing creativity. Now for Moreno, this was primarily in the categories of psychology—and from that, education, re-thinking, group work, social construction, etc. I make no claims that knowing about Moreno’s work alone will guarantee creative success in chemistry or engineering. But there are some principles that might cross-disciplines—which leads to the conference theme.

Innovation and integration—I like that. I think it’s a perfect time to tackle these processes. So I’ll talk about them. They complement each other. Innovation often involves differentiation: To do this task, I have to make these modifications. Give yourself permission to make modifications. Know they may not work. Nor will it help always to go back to orthodoxy. Nothing will do as a short-cut—watch for the way your mind wants to use short-cuts, make it easy. It’s a tendency that is good—how can we do this job easier?—that makes for all good inventions. Or cheaper.

But there’s only a hair’s breadth difference from that lapsing into reliance on the cultural conserve—reliance, an abdication of responsibility—a looking to someone else’s work—not to inform you, but to answer your question. This is a pervasive and deep human tendency, a subtle self-delusional form of folly. Because other solutions are occasionally applicable, at least for a while; but often misleading! The activity of experimenting, re-thinking, trying again, re-thinking, —that is improvisation—cannot rely on what worked in the past or for someone else.

Expanding Consciousness 1

Psychodrama’s rationale is that it offers the most multi-modal approach for integrating the many aspects of the psyche—and that includes aspects that are not readily brought into explicit consciousness otherwise. In a larger sense all forms of therapy and many other cultural trends participate in this consciousness-broadening process over the last few centuries—it’s just that psychodrama offers an especially effective method for this purpose.

A number of trends in the culture—‘new age,” especially—use the metaphor of height—rising to “higher” consciousness. A few, such the analytical psychology of Carl G. Jung and his followers use the theme of “depth.” I’m using the image of breadth—a range of dynamics, thoughts, images, ideas, intuitions, feelings—many of which cannot be attached to language—or the language elements feel insufficient.

There is that which we admit to the wider world, and that which we admit only those we trust, a close other, perhaps, a therapist. There is a deeper or broader field of awareness that is shadowy. Ideas register dimly and are pushed away. Often intuitions or feelings have no way  of being transformed into clear thoughts, explicit consciousness, because there is no psychological or emotional framework for these ideas or feelings to fit in well.

Actually, if the fit is quite incompatible, the ideas or feelings go unconscious, have no access to consciousness—a level “deeper” than the repressed unconscious. The point being made, though, is that there are ways of bringing a wider range of ideas into consciousness:
   - for those that seem overly shameful, let them be with others who share those feelings (part of the dynamic of a group committed to personal development)
  - for ideas that seems foreign, let them hear others talk about such issues and begin to generate some level of familiarity and orientation
  - just hearing others use words to describe ideas and feelings—and learning what those words are—helps to open the path a bit
  - seeing others hear self-revelations with an attitude of compassion rather than harsh judgment, too-easy answers, or being discounted reduces the fear of being humiliated were one to even notice much less admit to feelings or thoughts that had previously been taboo.

I’ve found that a few elements of Morenian thinking help, too:
  - instead of imagining that there are well-known right answers, the ethos of creativity suggests that a certain amount of ambiguity and complexity is recognized and that “easy” responses don’t fit; rather, one must explore, discover, experiment. This gives people a re-frame: mild confusion is recognized as a potential for further creativity.  One isn’t seen as stupid so much in-the-process of creating.
   - the concept of spontaneity and improvisation offer an appreciation for groping, which is viwed as exploratory, creative, admirable. Making mistakes doesn’t prove that one is foolish, but rather taken as evidence of a willingness to engage and try improvisations—again, reframing engagement as a constructive activity
   - speaking in terms of roles offers a user-friendly language and this adds greatly to the process of broadening consciousness

More About "Consciousness Raising"

It may be that consciousness-raising involves, to some significant degree, consciousness-expansion, and that means bringing into explicit consciousness that which is vague, shadowy, on the edge. As an image of a target, this preconscious circle is perhaps ten or a hudred or more times the “size” of what is immediately used or accessed by ordinary consciousness. There’s a large shadowy, blurred area that many ignore, discount, avoid; some elements do register briefly and are then pushed away. They are inconsistent with one’s own self-image. Other thoughts, intuitions, imagery, and emotions have no place to connect, be plugged into any present schema of the self or the world, so they slip away.

What rises into explicit consciousness depends so much on not only inner maps but also outer audiences. Songs bursting from my heart peter off if I realize that no one is there to hear it, or that I can imagine no future audience and performance for which I’m rehearsing.

As to what doesn’t ”fit,” there’s the very large category of what I call the non-rational mind (see appendix) that for many people cannot be translated into spoken language or clear thoughts. Many undergo transformation by a variety of unconscious adaptations—and depending on the circumstances and inner repertoire, they are interpreted in misleading ways. For example, a person to whom something is given may feel conflicted about showing appreciation—it’s too weak or vulnerable—so for them, feeling appreciative spills over to feeling obligated and from there into annoyance and acting-out, which may manifest as snapping at the giver!

The more the preconscious can be opened and the mind becomes a bit more meta-cognitve, more psychologically minded, more interested in how the mind works, the more small elements that had heretofore been unacceptable (unconscious) can tolerate being peeked at (pre-conscious). And the more you can look at the pre-conscious in protected settings, the more these half-secret ideas become shared, the more one becomes accepting and inclusive of such thoughts and feelings.

Another way of saying this is that psychological mindedness is a complex skill, requiring the gradual build-up of sub-skills of self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, and a predominance of positive feelings about oneself that outweighs currents of shame or guilt or fear. This also requires the ability to find others with whom one feels safe—or the ability of the group leader to create a community that is amenable to techniques for support rather than reproach.

With this in mind, let’s look a bit at how psychodrama serves to open the mind.

Role Distribution

Our school system doesn’t make use of group dynamics enough; people grow up thinking they have to figure it out all by themselves. On occasion, though, some teachers encourage their students to work in teams. We should not underestimate the power of having friends who encourage, reassure, and draw out. The director, among his other functions, implicity operates as a facilitator. It’s as if she says, “Don’t feel you have to do all this yourself; I’ll help you.” It’s very reassuring to let someone else ask questions, give reassuring feedback, make suggestions that you’re free to reject or modify. And it’s good to have friends who will help you by playing parts, or sharing with you afterwards.

Group support and having allies on your team who will cover for you is great! It helps to be in a context where you know you won’t be put on the spot without sufficient warm-up.. The fear of humiliation or getting teacher disappointed or annoyed stifles creativity, because primal emotions block access to subtle mental processes.  reduces levels of anxiety

Including the Vulnerable

One of the more common elements in the psyche are thoughts and feelings that are pushed away because they make one feel vulnerable. A context that recognizes this and works to overcome vulnerability helps to draw such thoughts or feelings from the pre-conscious into the confidential conscious. The group that admits together that we’re all vulnerable is one element.

The recognition of ambivalence as a matter-of-fact reality is itself healing—and new to most people. Much of the culture believes we must strive to be strong, independent, kind, and other values, and to ensure the expression of these virtues, all remnants of their opposite must be dissipated. But in truth, this is mistaken on several levels: First, one can be brave even though another part is scared (e.g., words to song, “I whistle a happy tune,” from the Broadway musical, “The King and I”—1956?); so it’s okay to be ambivalent. Second, it is impossible to completely triumph over vulnerability, childish residues, and other non-valued “shadow” qualities.

It’s better to generate a norm in the group that recognizes and dialogues with such qualities. But  simply admitting they’re there diminishes the sense of vulnerability somewhat. People are disoriented, lonely, scared, and angry, and they don’t know it. We think strength is being able tolerate these feelings without it bothering us, but doing so just makes it worse, the feelings build up and undergo malignant transformations.

Disoriented—we’re taught not to interrupt teachers and ask questions, and it’s common that we get a little unplugged as to what’s the topic, get lost as to the thread of conversation, and in turn we innocently make shifts, segues from topic to topic, without adequate cues so that our listeners can realistically follow us. We make the connections unconsciously and assume others can follow.
Lonely: Are you still liking me?  Did anything happen that disrupted our contact? What is my status? Was my mistake very annoying or disappointing to you? We need so much more reassurance than anyone acknowledges. Lots and lots. Not just praise. We know we’re middling. Saying we’re great when we know we’re middling is phony and alienating. No, what we want to know is that you like me, that you’re happy with me, even though I’m middling. We’re still connected. And on and on.

Lonely: Our culture has lost its capacity for offering reassurance, recognition, comfort, support, and so forth as it has become more urbanized, people grow away from neighbors and family, and so forth. We aren't going to return to rural life, but we need something that reduces alienation. Wwe need a method that allows us to contain, work with, channel, understand, make safe, and explore this realm—not only of the mind, but also of the interpersonal and group field. This  is the real meaning of sociometry: People feel more cut off, isolated, hurt, unclear, confused about what goes on in their social matrix than anyone feels free or knows how to think or talk about. Getting clear, coming to some point of resolution, often helps settle this down.

Should I call and try to make amends? But I don’t know what I did wrong? Might she be tired and it has nothing to do with me? She said, “I’m all right,” and she obviously is bothered, but indeed, it might be she’s just premenstrual, or it’s something she ate, or an edge of some annoyance that has nothing to do with me. But I remember that once or many times she’s denied there was a problem and then it turns out that there was indeed a problem: I’d forgotten her birthday or something. Or I wasn’t nice enough to her mother. I don’t know and she isn’t going to tell me.”

“Of course I’m not going to tell him, he’d just say I was being stupid. And maybe I am. But I do feel annoyed.”  And these build up, so though I can’t remember why, I feel like he’s done it again, though I don’t know myself what it is he’s done.”

Scared: Did I say or do the right thing? Was it enough? Should I have done it better? How bad is it that I didn’t do more? Might you get angry with me if I make a mistake? And so forth.

Angry: Any discrepancy between what I want and what I get generates a tiny pulse of no. What builds up is the secondary process of the perception or belief that I can’t fix it, you won’t let me, you won’t listen to me, I can’t make it clear to you that this is not what I wanted. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s not only you, I get angry at myself, too.  And on and on. The point in all this is that most people, good people, reasonably smart people, are unconsciously inclined to repress these feelings that are inevitable in the friction of human interactions. We think we shouldn’t have any of these feelings—they’re baby-ish, too vulnerable, too petty, too stupid—and so we stifle them. We have a fantasy that were we to express them it would be in the form that babies express them, crude, general, inarticulate, and contemptible. There is little modeling for tactful mature ways to express such feelings.

Our individualistic, test-oriented school system teaches that progress is made by knowing precisely for a one-time "test," a "final exam." Most people don't expect or think about the alternative and very lively option of being allowed to try again, fail or only partly score, re-aiming, getting feedback, and trying again. This is more what happens in real life! This is also the principle behind the fancy word "cybernetics," a process that actively calls for and utilizes feedback and adjustment, the operation of giving and exchanging a series of signals over time, perhaps four to ten quick interactions. If they don’t get it you escalate a tiny amount in clarification and / or intensity. Try again. Be patient, don’t freak. Open to the possibility they are trying too—that idea is generally missing from people’s mental program.

It’s more than general words like trust and love and kindness—those may be general feelings that we go into a situation believing in, but in the hurly-burly of action, most people in our culture don’t know how to turn it into action. It’s like building houses—most folks know they’re needed, but few know exactly how to go about building a shelter. Knowing how is big.

Our world thinks that if you want to you can, and it is in major denial of the need to learn how. As a corollary, much good doesn’t get done because well-intentioned people don’t know how, and they don’t know they don’t know.

So there are general beliefs that are deeply wrong in their understanding of what life is about, beliefs such as “I should have known this by now, I’m so stupid” when in truth there was no realistic way one could have learned it because often those who might have taught it to us were not there, didn’t know it themselves, were so mixed in their interpersonal skills, often mean, that we shut down our capacity to learn, or their capacity to teach was low, and so forth.

And to say again, the belief is quite pervasive that the best way to cope with minor discomfort is to ignore it—which is perhaps true in contexts in which realistically there’s nothing else that can be done. This is true for psychology and interpersonal relations. But in a culture where psychology has advanced so that there are other things that can be done—namely, bring the problem up gently, work towards a culture in which authority figures can handle questions and requests for reassurance without it being an affront to their status, and so forth—and what we’re talking about is the whole almost absent art of self-assertion.

Equally needed is the art of self-assertion and self-soothing for those who are in roles of parent, teacher, and other helpers, so that requests for positive strokes are not seen as accusations of inadequacy.

So feelings and intuitions about our interpersonal field is at the pre-conscious level. To remind you, near the surface is what we admit to everyone (or most folks); and then there’s a slightly deeper level, what we admit to a select few or maybe only our therapist. In much discourse even the deeper level is not included. But the real gold mine is the next level down, the pre-conscious, the vast realm of what barely registers in our consciousness and we push away.  The point here is that this realm is ten to fifty times the size of what clearly registers, even if we are discreet enough not to blab it around—i.e., the second level. The third level has a rich variety:
  – our sense of how we feel we stand in the estimation of the other: funny, pitiful, helpless, mean, admirable, etc.—and more, how we rank, top, medium, low, compared to whatever reference point we’re unconsciously competing with 
  – are we liked or disliked and by how much (tele)
  – how much do we care about or prefer the other person... and the people... and the particular combination of the people (more tele)
   – how safe are we? If we make a mistake, who is there to be our spokesperson, our ally? Will we be forgiven?  What are the stakes here?  Playful or serious?
   – are we in synch with what’s up, on the same page, out of it, confused, disoriented, unsure?
   – do we know what we want in the present or is that itself a point of uncertainty or confusion?
   – how conflicted or ambivalent are we about what we seem to be for or against?
   – what voices of doubt or worry do we not want to have to deal with?
   – how tired are we, or wishing we could relax, or get away from responsibility?
   – how warmed up are we, or perhaps we feel more strongly about what’s up or some aspect of what’s up than most of the people, apparently?
   – feelings of shame in knowing about many qualities that remain under-developed and the use of more over-developed skills or qualities to compensate...
   – feelings of guilt of self-perceived sins of omission and sins of commission, even minor
   – feelings of regret over realistic activities
... and on and on.

People tend to treat all this as non-existent, but it operates as pervasively as germs in our culture, and the need to wash one’s hands well and a thousand other forms of food and water hygiene that, absent this knowledge of what seems invisible, leads to immeasurable disease, death, and misery. So the minor pulses of disorientation, loneliness, fear, and annoyance—pulses that can be managed if you know they are there and operating all the time with all people—don’t build up into interpersonal infections.

A few hundred years ago people were smaller and sicker as a baseline, even those who seemed relatively stronger. They were wracked by diseases and malnutrition that was part of just the normal state of being alive. Psychologically, it was true, also—the normal life was plagued by background noise of smells, fear, guilt, shame, and so forth. People had to use primal defenses of denial, displacement, and such just to cope, and that explains why they were so terribly cruel to one another, to animals, and so forth.

Mental hygiene is similar to physical hygiene. When people don’t know the rudiments of nutrition and cleanliness, and this operates also at the community level in terms of systems of food handling and water purification and sanitation, everyone suffers; and since it’s everyone, no one recognizes the degree to which all that suffering is unnecessary.

Part of my innovation—and in a sense it’s a kind of integration—is an expansion of our field’s identity beyond psychotherapy. This is nothing new—Moreno was into this from the get-go. He knew that these approaches applied to education, business, community building, and other things. His roots were in religion—he almost got involved in trying to start his own religion as a young man—but then went on to medical school. He was into the arts, and into radically re-thinking what art and drama are about. Many of these innovations have hardly or just begun to be implemented.

What I’m suggesting to you today, and we’ll do a goodly number of experiential exercises to bring it alive, is the innovation of expanding what we’re doing, recognizing more vividly— because I know many of you already know this—that what we’re about goes well beyond helping patients or—to use the recovery jargon—consumers.

I’m suggesting that what Moreno developed was a more multi-modal approach to thinking, communicating, and problem solving. By multi-modal I mean more modalities than just talking about a situation, or free association—still confined to words. I call our work “action explorations”—really, it’s psychodrama, but also sociodrama, sociometry, role training, role playing, methods of warming-up, bits and pieces of these elements, mixed with a philosophy of creativity. Why I prefer to use action exploration instead of psychodrama is explained on a paper on my website—suffice it to say that there are many advantages that have to do with jargon and relative degrees of access to certain words.

The modalities I will be emphasizing today will be the less-rational, and the less articulate. These are big—this is where most people live. The last few centuries in Europe and America have generated a rather logocentric culture—and that postmodernist bit of jargon is good because it highlights what we grew up believing: If you could explain what you want—logo, logic, reason—then it was okay, but if you couldn’t articulate it well, weren’t adept at wordsmithing, then too bad, you lose. This is how the Euro-American dominant culture exploited and, frankly, stole the land from the native peoples of the world—they believed seriously that if it were in words, in laws and regulations, if a clever lawyer could use these, it was ethical and good. Of course it was word-magic that was a rationalization for the crudest forms of colonialism.

The point now is that our culture is still overly oriented to words, to being articulate. Action methods allows the less articulate to have a voice—and that’s important. It’s not just the less articulate and the oppressed who are included by this method, it’s also those parts of us that cannot easily justify themselves—our preferences, our feelings, our imagery.

How many people have the privilege, feel entitled, to say to themselves, when presented with a coherent theological or philosophical argument, “Well, that may be okay for them, but it doesn’t feel right for me. I’ll consider it, and may or may not take some of those elements, but I need to create what images and ideas work for me.” But this kind of freedom is part of what Moreno was getting at, as best as I can tell.

Enough for the didactic. I’ve written much more on my website. Just google British Blatner Psychodrama.

The first exercise is sociometric. There are people here you’ve been seeing and wanting to get to know better. Here’s how we’ll facilitate that: Stand in a large circle around the outside of the room. Look around. Find someone—definitely not anyone to your immediate right or left–-that’s cheating—someone with whom you want to get to know better. When you have, and when I say go, not until, move out and connect. Once you connect, go away from the center of the group off to the side so that others can find each other. Go.

May I have your attention. Watch me out of the corner of your eye. When we make this gesture, stop talking and listen. We’ll do this several times so watch for it.

Spend another five minutes talking about choosing and being chosen, your feelings, and why you think you chose the other person, and how you think and feel about making contact. You’ll have an opportunity to do this more with others during this workshop.

- - -

Preference. Can’t always explain—often can’t really justify. But it’s an important dimension to include in action explorations.

Another one is the immediacy of an encounter. I’m simply inviting you to slow down and reflect on what you do in other contexts is encounter.
    Role reverse just a little. As dyad spend some time daring to imagine what the other person may be thinking about you.

- - -

April 26, 2012 and other miscellaneous notes:

    One of the themes of this conference is integrating, and one innovation I’ll present for you consideration is the very simple idea that the various core elements in psychodrama can be rationally integrated. This synthesis makes the field more dynamically coherent. Some have decried the lack of theory and I hereby actively disagree. I think there is a profound and compelling theory behind the practice of psychodrama—and beyond psychodrama—this rationale applies to many forms of what I call action explorations—spontaneity training, organizational development using sociometry, community work using sociodrama, many aspects of the more improvisational types of drama therapy, and so forth.

The rationale is simple. When two modalities can be intelligently integrated, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s the principle of holism in systems theory. An orchestra is greater than a mere assemblage of instruments even when combined with the players. The piece is composed for the parts to play off of each other.
So there are general beliefs that are deeply wrong in their understanding of what life is about, beliefs such as “I should have known this by now, I’m so stupid” when in truth there was no realistic way one could have learned it because often those who might have taught it to us were not there, didn’t know it themselves, were so mixed in their interpersonal skills, often mean, that we shut down our capacity to learn, or their capacity to teach was low, and so forth.

And to say again, the belief is quite pervasive that the best way to cope with minor discomfort is to ignore it—which is perhaps true in contexts in which realistically there’s nothing else that can be done. This is true for psychology and interpersonal relations. But in a culture where psychology has advanced so that there are other things that can be done—namely, bring the problem up gently, work towards a culture in which authority figures can handle questions and requests for reassurance without it being an affront to their status, and so forth—and what we’re talking about is the whole almost absent art of self-assertion.

Equally needed is the art of self-assertion and self-soothing for those who are in roles of parent, teacher, and other helpers, so that requests for positive strokes are not seen as accusations of inadequacy.

People tend to treat all this as non-existent, but it operates as pervasively as germs in our culture, and the need to wash one’s hands well and a thousand other forms of food and water hygiene that, absent this knowledge of what seems invisible, leads to immeasurable disease, death, and misery. So the minor pulses of disorientation, loneliness, fear, and annoyance—pulses that can be managed if you know they are there and operating all the time with all people—don’t build up into interpersonal infections.

A few hundred years ago people were smaller and sicker as a baseline, even those who seemed relatively stronger. They were wracked by diseases and malnutrition that was part of just the normal state of being alive. Psychologically, it was true, also—the normal life was plagued by background noise of smells, fear, guilt, shame, and so forth. People had to use primal defenses of denial, displacement, and such just to cope, and that explains why they were so terribly cruel to one another, to animals, and so forth.

Mental hygiene is similar to physical hygiene. When people don’t know the rudiments of nutrition and cleanliness, and this operates also at the community level in terms of systems of food handling and water purification and sanitation, everyone suffers; and since it’s everyone, no one recognizes the degree to which all that suffering is unnecessary.

Other Stuff Not Yet Edited Well:
Notes for Workshop June 19, 2012:

The first exercise is sociometric. There are people here you’ve been seeing and wanting to get to know better. Here’s how we’ll facilitate that: Stand in a large circle around the outside of the room. Look around. Find someone—definitely not anyone to your immediate right or left–-that’s cheating—someone with whom you want to get to know better. When you have, and when I say go, not until, move out and connect. Once you connect, go away from the center of the group off to the side so that others can find each other. Go.

May I have your attention. Watch me out of the corner of your eye. When we make this gesture, stop talking and listen. We’ll do this several times so watch for it.

Spend another five minutes talking about choosing and being chosen, your feelings, and why you think you chose the other person, and how you think and feel about making contact. You’ll have an opportunity to do this more with others during this workshop.

Empathy Building:

 For any given role there are things that are expressed overtly (level 1; and then asides, things that are expressed but only to a confidant—not ordinarily to the other. The biggest gold mine is what goes on at the pre-conscious level: this includes the stuff that one may think only briefly but then tends to be pushed away; or, equally, things that have never occurred to one as a clear thought, only as a feeling, or confused image. Here is where doubling and role reversal help others to express what they hadn’t clearly known before!

Preference. Can’t always explain—often can’t really justify. But it’s an important dimension to include in action explorations.

Another one is the immediacy of an encounter. I’m simply inviting you to slow down and reflect on what you do in other contexts is encounter.
    Role reverse just a little. As dyad spend some time daring to imagine what the other person may be thinking about you.

The art of observation in medicine is knowing what to look for. The art of empathy is hearing with a deeper ear—and the more you develop your sensitivity to the kinds of things people are not saying, the better you’ll be as both double and director.

People want to be known, but they also are afraid to know themselves. So when they hear someone else say that which resonates with that which is yet unspoken in their minds and hearts, that opens them a bit. This is what some ritual and some theatre and some poetry does.

We want to be known by people we believe will care about us compassionately. We don’t even know we want this, we almost dare not ask for it. It isn’t common that this level of encounter happens. Moreno glimpsed it with his image of encounter, but for me to look at you with your eyes is a bit of an art. Moreno was intuitive, but not deeply kind nor considerate. Carl Rogers was closer to the mark here with his authentic way of being and his doctrine of unconditional positive regard.


But I can’t afford to be empathic in general—the world is too full of spammers and scammers. In a group where we symmetrically disclose, and there is no particular agenda other than personal development and helping a group grow that offers support to each other—more in the spirit of some early religious communities— well, there’s more of a chance. We’re mixing that frame with a technology of empathy.

The key to empathy is imagination, what’s it like to be in that predicament. It can be practiced.

It doesn’t need to be perfectly accurate, but the more you do it, and let people correct you in your doing of it, the better you get.

This workshop will take off on people rising to another’s being.

A poet I encountered when I was about 20 had a line in a poem that struck a chord?
    But if there is a proud grief of barriers, and no man may rise to another’s being,
          What then for all men and words?

Can you experience being really understood? That’s the challenge we weave into the core of what we do. We do this using the tools of drama, and ourselves as improvisational script-writers of a sort. Given a person and a predicament, we warm up: What would it be like to be?

Now here’s the trick. We mix that activity with cybernetics—we ask for feedback: Is it this way? A bit, but also that. Aha, and we re-formulate, take it in. My wife said that a good actor takes direction well. If the director says, more this or less that, we adjust our intuition—not only our behavior, but our take on the situation so that it would be authentic to behave more this or less that. We get into the role deeper, and allow the other to ongoingly fertilize our creativity.

The other person gives guidance, yes, that’s it, or no, not that way. We shun pride and open to getting on the other’s wavelength. The game is not to impose our hypothesis—that is still pride in being clever—but rather to open again and again to what feels so for the other person. Now we’re doing empathy. It’s a skill, just like swimming, and you can get the knack. But part of this skill is getting pride out of the way. Listening, imagining.

I shouldn’t feel this way.   Isn’t this the way everyone is and how it is?  What can I hope for? Nobody ever suggested this? This whole way of being is new territory for lots of people—and those with mental illness—even more.
    I don’t know what to do here
    I don’t know how to think about this (I don’t have the relevant information, skill, framework, infrastructure, orientation, or attitude)
    I thought there was a right answer and that authorities (parents, scientists, politicians) knew what it was. Or that we might yet discover it.  (Just so that I don’t have to figure out a response on my own and take responsibility for it.)

Many forms of illusion and books about how we’re prone to illusions.


 With that general philosophical-intellectual perspective having been stated, let’s look at the challenge of broadening our field of awareness. There are yet many arenas that we screen out:
   - thoughts that occur to us that we don’t want to think
       - they might be incompatible with our limited system of self 
       - we may not know how to process this thought, integrate it
   - feelings, impressions, intuitions, that yet have no words
   - mixtures of the aforementioned
        “I know I shouldn’t feel this way, but
    I am just not ready to think about it, it all seems too much
    I don’t know how to be with this person or these people
    I can’t do it without more help
    I don’t yet trust them (or maybe never will)
    I don’t know what to do here
    I don’t know how to think about this (I don’t have the relevant information, skill, framework, infrastructure, orientation, or attitude)
    I thought there was a right answer and that authorities (parents, scientists, politicians) knew what it was. Or that we might yet discover it.  (Just so that I don’t have to figure out a response on my own and take responsibility for it.)

Frames:
   Higher power, what would they say. Or benign or proud sibling?
    What roles need to develop? Want to develop more.
           Fear of future projection. Daring to anticipate and refusing to fear disappointment. Magical thinking if you ask for it specifically can’t get it.

   What does you body want to do?
   
So let’s look at the pre-conscious:

First, there are thoughts that we don’t like to think. Some conflict with the unified and competent image we want to project, and / or we want to believe about ourselves. Some seem wicked, or more clueless or helpless than fits our pride-illusions. Some worry and get overwhelmed with fear, so we push them away. Some are impatient and annoyed, with others and also with our own unrealistic expectations. So bringing them into the dialogue is awkward, but it must be done. Doubling, multiple parts of self, and other psychodramatic techniques help.

Second, there are feelings that haven’t been able to find words. This is a big part of it.

If you think about it, a good deal of human emotional maturation involves bringing up thoughts and feelings from the preconscious into the explicitly conscious realm, so they can be dealt with. Some are rationally suppressed—put off for now, to be dealt with some other more opportune time. Some are cleverly disguised, sublimated, through play, expressed through writing or acting in plays, comic books, or through other activities. Some are refined and put to pro-social use in our work. Some we find we contain and tolerate. But this process of integration is ongoing.

Many—perhaps most—folks have yet much more of that vast realm of the preconscious to integrate. Nor is it all negative. Some of that involves creative ideas, generous and open-hearted impulses, but these are tinged with doubts that inhibit their free expression.

Harvesting this material often requires a concurrent sense that one knows how to process it. Drilling for oil is just dirty work unless there’s a sense of how to pipe the oil, refine it, and indeed create machines that utilize the refined products. The psychoanalytic word for this is a broad category of activities called sublimation—and I question whether it’s ever been finely explained. (Perhaps that’s because sublimation is partly a creative process, and we’ll talk more about creativity later.)
      -      -      -      -     -
   
Widening the Field of Awareness

What do we ignore, screen out? Where is our attention focused and from what do withdraw
attention. In the not too distant past the “other” was not thought of as “us”—the concept of universal human rights didn’t exist; the concept of animal rights is still controversial; and discrimination against those with different races, ages, ethnic backgrounds, religions, sexual orientations, and other variations was pervasive—even a subject for jokes.

We screen out, narrow our attention, select our focus for empathy—sometimes to the boundaries of our own bodies, or parts of our mind.  We “cathect” or emotionally invest in certain complexes and words—honor, strength, virture—while wholly rejecting that which partakes of the merest shred or shadow of what we associate semantically with the opposite of those qualities.  There’s a magical thinking process here: If we focus on our goals or aspirations, and turn away from what we don’t want to be or have even a smidgeon of in our being, then we’ll get there. But (as young children think) if there’s any bit of the opposite of our goal-ideal, then we’re insufficiently pure and good and will be condemned or disrespected or rejected just as much as if we were totally evil. It’s a rather foolish and simplistic black or white mode of thinking. Alas,elements of it have become institutionalized by many adults who are only clever enough to elaborate their words well, but not smart enough to realize the folly of dichotomous thinking.

Psychologically, the truth is that humans cannot eliminate their less worthy parts, their immature complexes, their wavering abilities to stay alert and thoughtful and righteous. We are mixed, deeply so, and in truth we can for the most part manage this mixture better if we stop trying to get a triumph of what we hold good over what we devalue. Management should include all elements. This might extend to how we think about politics and religion, too.

So broadening our scope is wise: The more we know what’s there the better we can deal with it. Germs are there. Toxic levels of lead or other substances might be there. We improve our overall  health by acknowledging that the non-obvious can still cause trouble.


Many forms of illusion and books about how we’re prone to illusions.
    
I am noted in the program as a theorist in our field and I accept that role—I am indeed. It doesn’t make me right, mind you, but I want to let you know now that I’m open to your input.  There is a need for further systematization, for clarification and agreement on something as simple as terminology.

     What does your body want to do?  What does your higher self say
    If you were sensitive, what would you pick up that you want to know more clearly?
    What sensitivities would you like to cultivate?

  Another way of getting to know ur preconscious field is simply to begin to name different parts of yourself and consider...       Roles to let go, roles to develop
          The social atom is a technique for bringing to mind the evocative question of who is for you closer and farther off, and how you feel about them, and what do you fantasize they feel towards you, if you dared think about such things. This is its most powerful application, as a trigger to contemplation about your relationships and the sociometry. It’s a portal.

  Here’s another: Have you ever shared with another or even taken stock of yourself just in terms of your significant losses. My dad died when I was 13 and he had been sickly and a bit distant, and I hadn’t really known what I lost—because some role components I didn’t have. Forty years later I saw a father and son interacting, playing together, and I realized another level of that loss.

 You can use the growing skill of imaginativeness in the context of being a director or playwright. You can imagine with practice scenes that you hadn’t dared to imagine before: Conversations, dialogs with those who have died, even unborn children, miscarriages.
       What would a guardian angel say of it’s job with you so far?  
 
   Surplus reality , higher beings, put out and share, playbak theatre, ideas based on what they do

intensive...choose and we’re gonna work it using techniques we all know
 see how techniqus used in the service of this meta practical potential
     If at first you don’t have images, that’s part of the art: What questions would warm you up to daring to hear the voices, see the figures. You may be more auditory than visual. That’s okay. Or tactile, feeling your way into a scene, or what would feel good.
I don’t have images...

3/31/12: The Rationale for Psychodrama-1.

Psychodrama should not be viewed as a single therapy, but rather as a complex of concepts and techniques that can be adapted fro use with many types of problems. However, the procedure and combination of tools used varies, just as it does for surgery—how deep, where to "cut" or "suture," etc. Using that analogy, I am concerned that we attend as much to follow-up, because many patients tend to relapse. The "sicker" or more dysfunctional a client is, the more there tends to be several elements—"co-morbidities"—whether that involve an addiction, family pressures or strains, occupational and economic issues, etc. As I describe in other writings on the real diagnostic variables on my website, there can be considerable variability in degrees of voluntariness, psychological-mindedness, ego-strength, and socio-economic resources. By no means should we assume that these are all fine if we just clear away the pathology.

One of the important contributions of positive psychology is that it has heightened the recognition of the lack of a repertoire for healthy coping in some clients. Without those, the "surgery" approach of just fixing the error won’t hold, because as a whole some clients lack resilience, or are also caught up in multiple side problems that draw them back into the same or other kinds of either frank psychopathology or marginal coping.

What is the after-care program, the equivalent in surgery being often the weeks or months of physical therapy, and maybe occupational therapy, family counseling, and vocational guidance that might follow, say, an amputation. The surgery itself is only an opening to this more multi-modal process?

One concern, then, is follow-up evaluation as well as follow-up care. A case study that ends with the client seeming to have gotten an insight, experienced a breakthrough, etc., does not convince me. The presence of auxiliaries and an extended time at the center of attention has a strong "placebo" effect. Many will seem "better." The question should be their ability to sustain their gains or convert their insights into real-life.
 - - -
61212: Innovation and Integration

First, I want to promote a process of unlearning-and-re-learning that is necessary for integration. The unlearning is that the world can be meaningfully divided into compartments, which requires analysis, separating wholes into parts, dis-integration. The re-learning at another level is that the boundaries between compartments are illusory and can dissolve.

My first innovation is to remind us all that we’re part of a more inter-disciplinary super-field, a field that bridges over and includes
   Applications in education at all levels, in business and organizational development, in social change and recreation, and other areas. All speak to an even higher level of consciousness development.


We can’t lose our fear if we’re flopping around and don’t know what’s going on. But action explorations allows us to structure meaningful in a way that doesn’t overwhelm ourselves. A simple process begins at the outside and works deeper. Consciousness development isn’t about going higher but rather broader, expanding into what seems deeper or on the edges of our awareness.

The last part of the workshop will examine the edge of the future, the dream of our life, the power to charge of the power of our imagination and learn to focus and use it to be the more that we can be. Our goal is—what M gave us—to go beyond mere normalization, adjustment, to become a creator.

In the last century re-creating our lives was an eccentricty

We’re offering a way to do that, and give an orientation

Use methods we’re familiar with in service of consciousness development
   Dream dream onward,  So let’s have fun because it’s always more effective to learn in safe and fun contexts.  Talk show host. Our ability to enter an imagined role and penetrate to some basic emotions is a skill that can transfer to our own development and people-helpers.
    Occupation that they never had and even something possibly outrageous,
   
Consciousness Development   (A Bigger View of History as Evolutionary)

Action Explorations    Peacemaking   Journalism    Workshops-Teachings    
Psychotherapy Business   Organizational Development   Education    Spiritual Development   Social Change   Recreation    

Psychodrama, Bibliodrama, Axiodrama, Sociometry, Improv, Montessori Education\\\

Experiential, multi-modal learning plus context that ongoingly maintains safety, gentleness, friendliness, mutual support.  Such circumstances promote all the above.
 
The Preconscious:
    This is the most human part, containing paradoxes, feelings, intuitions, subtle social perceptions, it is more authentic because it allows for the reality that we play many roles and they often are in conflict. Part of me x but part of me y.

    A major part of human maturation is learning how to harvest this subtle field of information and to integrate it.

     Some material partakes of the shadow complex and must be sublimated or distilled to find the useful parts.

Ken Wilber talks about a 4-quadrant model: subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, objective (e.g. brain, basic intelligence, ability, neurological givens) and systems.
     We are at the edge of collaboratively weaving play and consciousness-development in to human systems, mixing technology, biology, history, and the ideal of co-evolution.

June 17, 2012

The innovations I have to offer are really extensions—system-atizations— of Moreno’s ideas. This has been needed, because while he had brilliant insights, they weren’t in my mind adequately presented so that one who wanted to see the logic in them could do so. I’ve found Morenian thought attractive and didn’t know why, exactly, so I have been contemplating its elements, and gradually have come up with a goodly number of links.

As for integrations, what needs to happen in this field is to continue to look at what’s been happening in related fields.


Who else?

Some people use the word psychodrama to refer to forms of theatre in education, scripted, but dealing with psychological matters, such as the plight of the mentally ill, and the plight of their families in seeking help—sometimes without the consent of the identified patient.

Many journalists have begun to mis-use the word to describe any situation rich in clues as to personal quirks and mild to severe psychopathology. No therapeutic purpose is recognized.

Although many of our colleagues have taken to using words other than psychodrama, others who  are more sentimentally attached to that word and imagine that any dilution is an affront to Moreno’s memory. So words are at issue here.

I’ve been noting that psychodrama and other Morenian approaches operate within a number of larger categories.
    One involves those who describe sub-types of therapy, and psychodrama is put with others but fit neatly nowhere—is it a type of existential-humanistic psychology, or as a few have mis-stated it, a sub-set of psychoanalysis (ha!)? There are behaviorist elements in role training, and so forth.
    So psychodrama might be thought of as a more active form of therapy or experiential treatment.

   Another higher category I called applied theater 5 years ago, but now I call it action explorations.  I changed what I called it because the words drama and theatre are generally used by most theatre artists and consumers as scripted and rehearsed theatre.

Many of our colleagues in and beyond psychodrama and in drama therapy have an unclear relationship to drama. I think they see psychodrama as just one form. I did. Now I see action explorations in more contrast, differing in some very deep ways.

Drama and enactment, role and predicament, not just abstract formulations of dynamics—this the two types have in common. But I am more impressed than ever with key differences:

   Improvisation
      And not for a large audience to amuse or impress them, but to involve them and broaden consciousness!  This is a very big difference.
      Indeed, the audience or group becomes the source of the main actor, and in a later process, that same person blends back into the audience or may play a supporting role to someone else who becomes the protagonist or main player for a while. These are important, not trivial differences.

The problem is that many psychodramatists and even more drama therapists are secretly or overtly interested in traditional drama, scripted, rehearsed drama, performance, and want it both ways. That’s okay with me, but then they muddle the middle, and that’s maybe okay if they wouldn’t then muddle up what psychodrama is about.

Given a local show, they’ll relapse into producing, directing, scriptwriting, or acting in more traditional theatrical rehearsed and scripted forms. That’s okay too, but what gets muddled is the awareness that the essence of the Morenian approach is that it is fundamentally populist, no talent required, just just exploring situations in their lives—sociodramatically, psycho-dramatically, and even on occasion axio-dramatically!

The key here though is that we should note that there is indeed a very fundamental distinction to be made for groups that are using quasi-dramatized explorations, improvised, focused on the process, from groups presenting a fixed production for an audience. Admittedly there are some intermediate forms, but most people know little of anything but scripted and rehearsed obvious fictional stories—i.e., traditional theatre.

Moreno himself did this middle ground, with his Theatre of Spontaneity in Vienna, and Impromptu Theatre in New York city in the early 1930s. But thereafter he turned more clearly to what I call action explorations.  Drama therapy is sort of in-between.




Part of my innovation—and in a sense it’s a kind of integration—is an expansion of our field’s identity beyond psychotherapy. This is nothing new—Moreno was into this from the get-go. He knew that these approaches applied to education, business, community building, and other things. His roots were in religion—he almost got involved in trying to start his own religion as a young man—but then went on to medical school. He was into the arts, and into radically re-thinking what art and drama are about. Many of these innovations have hardly or just begun to be implemented.

What I’m suggesting to you today, and we’ll do a goodly number of experiential exercises to bring it alive, is the innovation of expanding what we’re doing, recognizing more vividly— because I know many of you already know this—that what we’re about goes well beyond helping patients or—to use the recovery jargon—consumers.

I’m suggesting that what Moreno developed was a more multi-modal approach to thinking, communicating, and problem solving. By multi-modal I mean more modalities than just talking about a situation, or free association—still confined to words. I call our work “action explorations”—really, it’s psychodrama, but also sociodrama, sociometry, role training, role playing, methods of warming-up, bits and pieces of these elements, mixed with a philosophy of creativity. Why I prefer to use action exploration instead of psychodrama is explained on a paper on my website—suffice it to say that there are many advantages that have to do with jargon and relative degrees of access to certain words.

The modalities I will be emphasizing today will be the less-rational, and the less articulate. These are big—this is where most people live. The last few centuries in Europe and America have generated a rather logocentric culture—and that postmodernist bit of jargon is good because it highlights what we grew up believing: If you could explain what you want—logo, logic, reason—then it was okay, but if you couldn’t articulate it well, weren’t adept at wordsmithing, then too bad, you lose. This is how the Euro-American dominant culture exploited and, frankly, stole the land from the native peoples of the world—they believed seriously that if it were in words, in laws and regulations, if a clever lawyer could use these, it was ethical and good. Of course it was word-magic that was a rationalization for the crudest forms of colonialism.

The point now is that our culture is still overly oriented to words, to being articulate. Action methods allows the less articulate to have a voice—and that’s important. It’s not just the less articulate and the oppressed who are included by this method, it’s also those parts of us that cannot easily justify themselves—our preferences, our feelings, our imagery.

How many people have the privilege, feel entitled, to say to themselves, when presented with a coherent theological or philosophical argument, “Well, that may be okay for them, but it doesn’t feel right for me. I’ll consider it, and may or may not take some of those elements, but I need to create what images and ideas work for me.” But this kind of freedom is part of what Moreno was getting at, as best as I can tell.

Enough for the didactic. I’ve written much more on my website. Just google British Blatner Psychodrama.

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References

Blatner, A. (Winter, 2007). Morenean approaches: recognizing psychodrama's many facets. Journal of Group Psychotherapy, Psychodrama & Sociometry, 59 (4), 159 - 170.

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For responses, email me at adam@blatner.com