I’ve been linking the earthquake with Medusa. For some she is so frightening with her head of snakes that they turn to stone if they look.
Like this one by Jonathan Ewart
The Stage as Alchemical Crucible
Looking for ideas on this notion I came across posts from Don Reekie. Not exactly a crucible but a space that is more than a physical construction. A space for truth.
http://www.donreekie.com/2010/04/stage-a-wonderful-and-particular-place-in-reality/
http://www.donreekie.com/2010/04/staging-and-reality/
What happens when we step out of ordinary reality onto the psychodrama stage is that the metaxy comes alive, the medial world lives, the soul can live.
This happens as many principles come into play. One is containment. Restraint. The container of the stage is like the alchemical crucible. It must not break. For the work to be done the vessel must hold even when it boils and shakes.
It is a therapeutic relationship, a marriage, a church. Temenos.
This is on my mind as I think of a dialogue as a way of creating a crucible for truth about what is usually invisible… matters of mind and imagination. Dialogue goes beyond a good conversation.
wild and precious life
Mary Oliver (Wikipedia)
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
~
The Kingfisher
Mary Oliver
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world–so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your
whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the
water
remains water–hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could
believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the
silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and
easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
Jesus the man, Jobs the man
To make sense of this post you may need to read my last entry.
Also you may need to know who Barnum was:
And read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?src=dayp that my friend Amy just sent me.
Jobs may well be a Barnum, and like Barnum he creates a new medium for communication, but it is not just the man. It is as if humanity is ready for a jump and it finds a vehicle to make it happen. Unfortunately it has to make in the capitalist context, given the failure of the German revolution after World War one. While Jobs is a creative guy, no doubt, and while he is enough of a Barnum to pull it all off in the world as it is, the world was ripe for a new leap in communication, to go beyond printing presses and beyond tele type machines. It took someone to make the next leap actual. Zuckerberg is another such. These steps in the evolution of the psyche are all distorted by the fucked up relations of production. The agony is to live in a sick social system, the actual agony of children in chinese factories and the agony of collusion, alienation and powerlessness for many others of us.
The leap in relations of production that we were on the edge of in capitalist countries at the start of the last century did not happen, history missed its natural turning. If we were in an era of new social relations of production the miserable state of psychological developments would not be the context for these technical innovations leading to huge cultural global shifts sweeping the world. However Rosa Luxembourg was assassinated, the social democrats subverted the revolution, industrial revolutions happens in the name of socialism and distorted the history of possible new relations of production. But that is how it is.
So what of new developments? Everything we create or do is in a backward social system. Creativity is social and public, but ownership lags behind, it is private and coercive and seeks out Dickensian situations such as china to maximize profits and to avoid failure in the market. I don’t think Jobs sold out on his vision, I imagine there was agony in making it happen.
Should he not have made the mouse, the first personal pc? Should we not use the technology? It is tempting as every object contains the labour power of the poor and exploited. I don’t think it it’s the answer to smash the tools, unless there was a mass movement of boycott. Even then the much needed jump is nothing to do with the tools, but in the relations of production, and this not because “we” collude with Chinese fascism, as Mike Daisey implies in the NYT interview. It is more that capitalism went global, that it is alive and well as a system. Not so well actually, perhaps in its vicious death trows. Who will lead that transition we are now on the edge of? We are ripe for another leap.
The revolution, innovation, the next big thing will not be technological but social and political. People who lead this next leap forward won’t be just great writers like Marx or orators like Lenin and Trotsky but people able to lead using the new orality of the Internet, even though its built with an unjust system of production. The screens are not the same thing as the humans who communicate via those screens. Revolution won’t be be because of the the Internet, but it can’t happen if people throw away their telephones and everything made in China, we live in this world.
The reflection I’m making, if it is not obvious, is that there are mighty forces at work, and that no one man Jesus or Jobs is really the cause of them. There is always someone who gives expression most fully and effectively to a collective urge. The power of leaders is not only because of what they do or say, but because of the ripeness of the culture they speak to. The culture chooses leaders.
Making sense of myths
I finished the book by CK Stead “My name Was Judas” recently. I quite enjoyed it. For someone who was not bought up in a Christian church tradition it is amazing how much of the story of Jesus is in my bones. Ive absorbed it from the culture.
CK Stead presents Judas (who is alive 40 years after the crucifixion) as a modern humanist. He has good values, and thinks Jesus went a bit crazy to claim he was the son of god. It all makes good sense. Miracles are exaggerations developed by people with wishful thinking.
I’m not a humanist, and I’m not a Christian, so the book was not satisfying at a deeper level. I’d like to see a sequel where Judas begins to see that the literal story of Jesus was the foundation for a myth. An important myth where the divinity of humanity began to be grasped by humanity. That people co created the story of Jesus as devine and to see through the absurdity into the real meaning of the story.
It’s like that with 2012. To think next year will be somehow different because of the date is absurd. but there is power in the myth! We live in extraordinary times. The myths makes them even more extraordinary and might even have a self fulfilling aspect to them.
This last idea is pretty much what Jean Houston says in an interview by Tami Simon on www.mysteryof2012.com.
Validating Mirror and Evaluative Mirror
I have been reflecting on a while on what appears to be different uses of the term “mirroring’ in various psychotherapeutic modalities. It was useful to come across Peter Felix Kellermann’s distinction between two types of mirroring.
Validating Mirror
“When I look, iam seen so I exist.” – Winnicott
Evaluative Mirror
Learning to see how others see you
Kellermann, Peter Felix 2007, Lets Face it, Mirroring in Psychodrama in Psychodrama Advances in Theory and Practice. Baim, Burmeister and Maciel, Routlidge
Marriage and family therapy – Moreno
Here is a fuller quote of a section quoted earlier.
Marriage and family therapy for instance, has to be so conducted that the “interpsyche” of the entire group is re-enacted so that all their tele-relations, their co-conscious and co-unconscious states are brought to life. Co-conscious and co-unconscious states are by definition such states which the partners have experienced and produced jointly and which can therefore be only jointly reproduced or re-enacted. A co-conscious or a co-unconscious state can not be the property of one individual only. It is always a common property and cannot be reproduced but by a combined effort. If a re-enactment of such co-conscious or co-unconscious state is desired or necessary, that re-enactment has to take place with the help of all partners involved in the episode. The logical method of such re-enactment a deux is psychodrama. However great a genius of perception one partner of the ensemble might have, he or she can not produce that episode alone because they have in common their co-conscious and co-unconscious states which are the matrix from which they drew their inspiration and knowledge.
Psychodrama Volume 1, 4th edition, page vii
Sociodrama in a Changing World
By Eds. Ron Wiener, Di Adderley, Kate Kirk
Paperback, 384 pages
| Price: | $33.65 |
|---|
Sociodrama is a flexible, creative, spontaneous way of working with groups, both large and small, to explore the systems we live in and which impact upon us. Originally part of J.L. Moreno’s teaching, sociodrama is used across the world in endeavours such as: conflict management, school and higher level teaching, team building, cross-cultural exploration, problem-solving, change management, role training, community and organisational development, consultancy, story-telling, understanding the news, future planning, political change and much more. This book brings together examples of the work of sociodramatists from around the world, together with a wide-ranging collection of views on the current debate ‘What is Sociodrama?’
Couple at the core
The idea that couple has a special place in the family system, or the social atom is somewhat obvious perhaps. Murray Bowen makes that claim (see quote below) but the implications go very deep into how we do psychotherapy. If it is the relationship that is central then it puts a new light on attachment. Not to deny the importance of the mother child bond, it is deeply influenced by the mother father bond (or absence of one. The child will have a relationship that mirrors their relationship wit mother. For many years I’ve concretised the parental relationship in individual therapy and this often has a big impact on the client. They can see how their sense of place and their relationships are all influenced by their place in that primary diad.
This quote is from Differentiation of Self in the Therapist’s Family of Origin by Philip Rich
Bowen considers the marital coalition, or the two spouses/parents, as comprising the essentials of the family core, and, accordingly, sees the therapist’s task as that of constituting a new triangle with the two primary family members and the therapist as its members.14 However, the basic principle in this method of psychotherapy requires that the therapist remain emotionally outside of the field of emotions that involves the spouses and, thus, to remain “detriangled.â€15 Bowen maintains that it is important that the therapist be a highly differentiated individual in order to remain an emotionally objective observer in the midst of an emotional system in turmoil, while at the same time relating intimately to key people in the system
Zerka Moreno on Doubling, Tele, inter-psyche, relationship
Still thinking about the interpsyche – and found this passage from Zerka Moreno in the Psychodrama Network News from the American Society of group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama 2005 I now see the difference between empathy and doubling. Doubling in its conception includes the relationship, it is not the intuition of the therapist directly but the voice of the interpsyche – the relationship between two people.
But there is another, more important, aspect of McGaw’s presentation. When he speaks about how his doubling with a protagonist is so often correct, he interprets this as due to his intuitive ability. When pressed by Rogers to explain it more specifically while speaking of his own power in that respect, he refers to it as his “empathy.” Unfortunately, he overlooks the contribution to the process by the protagonist, as if it all comes out of the therapist’s psyche, that of a single mind. By unfortunate I mean that this is just the area of Moreno’s contribution, namely to have pointed out that it is the interaction between people – tele – resulting in the “inter-psyche,” the space between people, that is the foundation of his and our work. This observation, more than anything else McGaw speaks of, tells me he has not really grasped Moreno’s message. It is our emphasis on the moment, the here and now, the spontaneity of the protagonist, the interaction of minds, that distinguishes our own field from that of individual psychology, a lesson we must never overlook.
Zerka Moreno makes it so clear psychodrama is a relational not an individual method.
Recently while teaching doubling it was clear the person was trying to think what the other person was thinking. Close, but not quite it. I said… let yourself be him, become him, breathe like him, sit like him, look at the world through his eyes and then voice what comes up, you won’t be guessing, you don’t have a choice about what comes up.
The doubling was then noticeably different even though not always exactly right.
__________________________________________________
Later: Saturday, 6 October, 2012
I’m now (post the Dan Wile workshop) thinking the phrase above, “you don’t have a choice about what comes up” is right, but not enough.
Many things will come up and it is useful to choose to voice those things that are progressive for the protagonist, such things as empathy for another person, declaring an inner struggle, claiming the validity of experience.
Judgement of others, blaming and self righteous anger may also come up. They could be ignored, but if they feature strongly they could be moderated with such phrases as: I know this is might not be easy for you to hear. I wish I had a way of expressing this more constructively. I have been sitting on this for a long time and my intention is to bring it out to improve the relationship.
Later: Sunday, 29 November 2015
…this is just the area of Moreno’s contribution, namely to have pointed out that it is the interaction between people – tele – resulting in the “inter-psyche,” the space between people, that is the foundation of his and our work.
This makes it so clear that Moreno had the relational paradigm, he did not call it that and he often slips into thinking of individuals, yet he is so instrumental in this as an influence on Buber and then Harville Hendrix and Hedy Schleifer.
Later, Monday, 30 October 2023
I’m not worried about the words empathy or doubling. What matters is that it comes from the “interpsyche” – the “interaction of minds” that distinguishes “our own field from that of individual psychology.”
Ok, so it is a case of 1 + 1 = 1. (the interpsyche)
How about 1 + 1 = 3, you, me and the relationship?
Its all a matter of degrees,
Throw in dialectics and emergent complexity.
Maybe add a bit of quantum.
Moreno would approve.
Be one with the other. That’s doubling. We say “doubling” when we mean becoming one.
In classic doubling the double stands slightly behind, follows the breathing and body posture. And the double looks where the protagonist looks. Or is the protagonist avoiding looking? The protagonist ( i.e. anybody) has a social and cultural atom – they are never alone. The stage may be empty – but in another, surplus, reality the stage is filled with entities. This is all there for the for the double/protagonist unity to explore.
Call it clairvoyance, tele-pathy, or by any name. We need many names as there are varieties of interpsychic experiences.
Consider this an encounter between a couple facing each other:
Partner 1: I imagine you might be feeling worried.
Partner 2: Yes, I’m scared that nothing will come of it…
P1: I see… you are scared.
P2: Yes I’m terrified to be honest.
P1: Terrified.
P2: Yes.
That may not look like magic but imagine a couple who never did this “I imagine…” thing. How baren that would be. That step of imagination initiates a process of entering the interpsyche.
This example is classic Imago, and they call it empathy.
*
To put these reflections in context, I looked for this post because I’ve offered to run a Theatre of Spontaneity session.
“The next Theatre of Spontaneity will be on Tuesday 7 November.
Walter will direct the evening on the theme of Empathy with a focus on empathy in organisations”
I was inspired to this by Dan who ran something like this on leadership.