Walter Logeman: Journal
Psychodrama is a form of therapy. Jacob Levi Moreno founded the the early forms of the philosophy and practice in Vienna early in the last century. On page one of his seminal book: “Who Shall Survive?” he wrote about a therapeutic procedure.
Clearly a therapeutic procedure that has as its objective the whole of humankind stands out as a special case of psychotherapy. Psychodrama is a special case…
Continue reading “What is Psychodrama?”
I had to do a big thing. The whole of this blog was corrupted. Nothing. With long guides about how to reinstall and reconnect to the database I did it.
I was scared of loosing this. I realise how much I love it when it is gone. Like Christchurch after the earthquake – I was not really home here in Christchurch till now when it is just a mess.
Pleased to see my post about wisdom & consciousness come up. How against the grain that is! I wonder why so may of the people I know who are “idealist in the philosophical sense” don’t dispute my outrageous claims against the received wisdom that is the engine that drives psychotherapy and pretty much all of self help and liberal politics.
Never mind… I’m saying nothing original, just marxism and Moreno stuff that no-one seems to get. I’m curious… is this important? I don’t think liberal tolerance of liberal ideas is a healthy thing. But then it does not really matter… that is the point, reality will win out no matter what stories we tell.
Bear with my reflections…
The ideology does not matter, but being in touch with what reality is up to… that does matter. Who can really figure What is to be done at this time? Wishful thinking wont help much.
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Anyway, pleased the blog is back
Later, Tuesday, 17 October, 2017
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
… every culture is characterized by a certain set of roles which it imposes with a varying degree of success upon its membership.
Moreno Who Shall Survive? p. 88
Two forms of the cultural conserve are referred to in my writings: the technological conserve, as books, motion pictures, robots, and the “human” conserve, the conserve which uses the human organism for its vehicle.
Psychodrama v. 1 p. 123
Pace Layers Thinking: Paul Saffo and Stewart Brand @ The Interval — January 27, 02015
Wonderful podcast. Great exposition of an idea that came through looking at houses and then could be generalised.
The thinking applies to design as well as social change.
The image gives the idea:
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I think of other theories of change:
Needs more explaining but has broad application W = warm-up
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And then there is Dialectics. Not to be dismissed. Hegelian and then Marxist.
Just listened to Plato’s Republic podcast on BBC, In out Time — Plato’s Republic MP3
Got me thinking about the story of the cave. Ordinary people are fooled. Only certain elite trained people can see the world properly. They are enlightened. At one point they mention that knowledge (according to Plato) is not “bits” but that at a certain point there is a whole shift to a new mental state. It reminds me of spiritual enlightenment. They use the word ‘enlightenment’ in the podcast.
I think a qualitative shift in knowledge is possible. But it is not in the state of mind, that makes the shift. Something has been discovered, it is based on evidence. It can be taught, e.g. The world is round – species evolve. That is not a new state of mind, anyone can learn these things. There is “common wisdom” (maybe as old as this stuff in Plato) that ordinary learning won’t do the trick, that we need to go through some spiritual process of cleansing, saving or sitting and that there are special teachers. Plato certainly raises the right question – what is knowledge and what is belief, but his answers are not convincing, and maybe pernicious.
“We need a new state of consciousness before the world can change.” I hear that a lot. This spiritual answers seem wrong, yet Marx also talked of class consciousness. Certainly we need thorough study and knowledge. But the paradigm shifts don’t happen to “us” they happen as science, and social science discovers more about the way the things and people work. Then people need to be taught that stuff.
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Listened to another rather wonderful podcast Kim Hill interview with Ken Loach — Ken Loach – Life and films MP3 One moment I liked was where he says that class struggle in capitalism is not a belief of some kind. Once you have learned about it, like evolution, it is how it is.
Ken Loach:
People who impacted on me. Roughly in the order they did so. How I came to think the way I do, the intellectual & cultural biography. The juicier life story with real people is another, more personal story. The post about this post.
I had a few pop idols when I was a teenager. Mostly my mentors were people living around me. Then something new happened in a moment while reading Bertrand Russell that changed how I saw things. I think the book was called “On Morals”, but that does not seem to exist. Maybe it was Marriage and Morals but I can’t find the line I recall. “Morals is the science of how to live one’s life.” That does not Google, but that is what I recall. And as a teenager how to live my life was a burning question – that there was a science for that was very appealing. Further reading did not help much in a practical way (I will add Zorba The Greek to the list), but I began to read philosophy, and loved it.
I think of Russell as of marker in the sand for humanist, atheist, positivist rationality. ““I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.” I liked that. It summed up the atheism I was bought up with. (Now I think it is all a bit more mysterious. Maybe the universe forks and folds?)
And for a readers digest version of philosophy there is nothing to beat A History of Western Philosophy
And he was part of Ban the Bomb. And The Committee of 100
Talking of pop stars – this one was the first one I noticed. I was about 12.
Great stuff, but really, my main heroes were not popstars.
We had a book of his paintings at home, I saw a movie and read a biography. Later I saw exhibitions. Loved it all. I am attracted to outsiders.
CMW
Peter Pinney
The link to an album presented in Adobe Flash no longer works
Why he’s on the list.
Led to travel, New Zealand mountains.
Zorba the Greek
Colin Wilson
His book The Outsider led to my big shift at about same time as Peter Pinney
The book is a series of essays about what he calls outsiders, but presented from Wilsons existentialist position. Again how to live life! I identified with the central theme that outsiders are those who see too much. The main thing I got from the book is that I follwed through on every writer he mentioned. Now I knew who to look for in the library.
Colin Wilson is a bit of an embarrassment. He has an elitist perspective. Outsiders are artists and gifted, but not “supermen” above the doomed masses. He has an idea that the outsider has failed on some journey to enlightenment. I don’t like that type of spiritual approach to life, and did not even as CW put it forward.
Ivan Illich
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Marshall McLuhan
Stewart Brand
Karl Marx
Moreno
Osho
James Hillman
https://www.instapaper.com/read/1464712293
Thomas Moore
Marriage dead or alive
Marshall Rosenberg
Harville Hendrix
Hedy Schleifer
Bill Doherty
I quoted blogger Tim Boucher back in 2010 in this blog.
The link in that post to Tims page is only available on the Wayback Machine.
I dug it up today as I was thinking of mentors and heroes. I look back and see how admired them, I fell in love with some and idolised some. I still do! They are all different, they teach different things some are enemies of the other. I’m thinking of them as people I have learned from. Mentors might be the right word.
I still like what I wrote:
“I like to think I am not into having heroes but most of these from tb are my heroes. I’d add a few: J.L. Moreno, James Hillman, Jim Rough, Karl Marx, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Pinney… of course they are all a bit flawed, but that is where the light gets in… I’ll add Leonard Cohen, and there are a lot of non-famous real people who have had a bigger impact!”
And Tim replied:
“it’s not that your heroes need to be perfect, so much as it helps to have ideal images after which to model oneself. its a lot easier to build a car if you know what a car looks like, how it feels, how it operates!”
I’ll make a list, with some quotes and links. Maybe in rough chronological order of then coming into my life. I’ve begun the list!
Later Tuesday, 16 April 2019 — still working on that list — I’ve published the perpetual draft.
Skills, knowledge, spontaneity, intelligence, creativity and wisdom are not consciousness.
Easily and often confused. Consciousness raising, so effective in the 70s brought with it the idea that learning and education developed consciousness. Maybe the miss-use of the word began with Marx? Class consciousness, does he even use that word? If he did he did not mean that it could be developed by reading books or classes alone. Learning comes through experience. Why is using the word consciousness now in the 2010’s a problem?
Hmmm, bear with me… I’m exploring something.
People do not have higher or lower levels of consciousness. People have skills and abilities including the ability to warm up to spontaneity and creativity. People learn things in practice. Experience and relationships build ethical wisdom. Discrimination can be taught. Spontaneity can be trained.
To learn, people need relationships, access to teachers and books and crazy people ( typo) I meant craft people. Being around people who can sing, converse, act, make things, helps people learn. Generous people who share what they know are real teachers.
Action, involvement, engagement, immersion and courage to act and to make mistakes is how people enrich themselves and others. Out of action we get knowledge and ideas. Action first reflection second. Collaboration and interaction before contemplation. All of this makes us wiser.
Wisdom is not consciousness, it is attained through practice and living. Consciousness is a mysterious quality of knowing we are alive and exist. We just know it, but it is a mystery.
Becoming more able, relational, effective and wise is less mysterious, it takes access to good teachers. Courage to act. Willingness to seek advice. Ask questions. Discrimination. Love
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This is a simple ideal I’m trying to express. Dewey, Marx, Moreno all promoted action learning. Experiential learning. Now more than ever the dominant culture works to keep us passive, ignorant, isolated. Consciousness, higher, lower, altered, psychological, even radical, by any name is individual, private, personal.
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One of the reasons I’m exploring this line of thinking is that there are plenty of movements that promote the idea that if 10% (or whatever) of people reached some sort of higher state of consciousness then the world would be fixed.
It is more dialectical than that.
We are in process and as the world changes, we change. Action by action. Not only thought by thought.
Snapped that off my Kindle – it is a chapter title half way into Epitaph: A Novel of the O.K. Corral – by Mary Doria Russell – Amazon
I thought, wow that is well worded. Google:
“So on they fought like a swirl of living fire –
You could not say if the sun and moon still stood secure,
So dense the battle-haze that engulfed the brave
Who stood their ground to defend Patroclus’ body.”
Book 17, Illiad
“The truth is that the more intimately you know someone, the more clearly you’ll see their flaws. That’s just the way it is. This is why marriages fail, why children are abandoned, why friendships don’t last. You might think you love someone until you see the way they act when they’re out of money or under pressure or hungry, for goodness’ sake. Love is something different. Love is choosing to serve someone and be with someone in spite of their filthy heart. Love is patient and kind, love is deliberate. Love is hard. Love is pain and sacrifice, it’s seeing the darkness in another person and defying the impulse to jump ship.”
This is an internet thing, everyone quotes it. Attributed to The Great Kamryn whoever she is. Famous it seems for this one quote. Or is there more to it? Maybe in some library of physical docs?
Anyway, I like it.
http://inthemessy.com/tag/advent/
“We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.”
The space between is invisible – we can only talk about it in metaphor e.g. “broken heart”, “bound together”, “muddy path” and here as “sympathetic fibers”. Not only do we use metaphor, we can use images and symbold – rings, hearts. And in psychodrama we have the simple act of concretisation: place people or objects at a distance to show where they are in your life. Distance becomes visible and conveys meaning.
The quote above from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3500800.Henry_Melvill (not the Moby Dick man) seems to be saying that our actions can live after us and multiply. Then come back as karma. And then impact everyone. Be careful what you say and do it can reverberate into the future.
I think of this as Moreno’s sociometric matrix. Sympathetic is a nice word there with its roots in symphony – all the parts of the network working together.
The network of course is a physical metaphor for something unseen, the space.
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Background
http://melvilliana.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/finest-thing-herman-melville-never-said.html
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Lenin used the concept often
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/7thconf/24c.htm
All humanity is thrown into a tangled bloody heap from which no nation can extricate itself on its own. Though there are more and less advanced countries, this war has bound them all together by so many threads that escape from this tangle for any single country acting on its own is inconceivable.
