Autopix
I called this an autopix when I did them. I could do the outline with my eyes shut. Love to re-kindle.
The Structure of Therapy.
In his Poetics, the Greek philosopher Aristotle put forth the idea the play should imitate a single whole action. “A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end” (1450b27).[1] He split the play into two parts: complication and unravelling.
From wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure
Just like therapy!
The Reader and the Writer
Just read this here:
The reader is the musician of the book
https://austinkleon.com/2018/04/23/shelf-life-2/
“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer’s head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different.”
—Margaret Atwood
This of course rhymes and echoes with the concept of the Canon of Creativity – conserves > warm up > spontaneity > creativity.
I’m writing this post as it goes well with a thought we developed recently about The Writer.
The writer is the servant of the vision.
The writer can give the voice to the vision. The writer is not you, or the whole of you. The writer has a job to to. The vision needs no bounds. The writer will prune and edit in a way the visionary can’t.
The discipline of the writer will paradoxically enhance the vision.
What is the universe up to?
On the first day of training in Imago therapy Maya Kollman characterised a couple relationship as “A microcosm of the universe trying to repair itself.” In different words psychodrama includes the same idea, the therapeutic tele is distributed in the group, it’s not just in the director.
And there is qualitative evidence for this… A group, or a couple, once the connection is established and there is a warm up, will hum its way to more and more enabling solutions. I see it so clearly in psychodrama groups – each drama assists the whole group in a quest that is finally resolved. The terminology of ‘disturbing motive’ and ‘reactive fear’ is used to describe this process. Even this naming implies that it is the ‘disturbing motive’ that arises first and the the ‘reactive fear’ is simply the obstacles of the cultural conserve (CC) that need to get out of the way. CC is a term from the psychodramatic theory Canon of Creativity
An earlier post grapples with the same idea. https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/2018/the-survival-dance-that-gets-in-the-way-of-the-encounter/
There is a layer of conserved coping that is somehow “man made”, the reactive fear, which is usually followed by flight or fight i.e. Criticism and blaming or avoidance. There is another layer – the universe trying to heal itself. Lets just call it eros or love. Gt the crap out of the way and the love will come through.
Both psychodrama and Imago have the philosophy that the therapist is the catalyst, simply providing tools, like dialogue, or the 5 instruments so the eros can emerge.
I’m reflecting on the relationship between letting it happen and making it happen.
The inevitable can be helped along.
We are agents in the healing of the universe. i.e. in its progress. Towards eros.
We can make it worse or better. If this is a dead end it will proceed towards the omega point in some other way. The universe does not care, but it won’t stop its evolution, its development, its progress. These words are teleological.
We make history but under conditions of our choosing.
Surfing. We can but catch a wave or miss it.
Anyway, if we assume that a group or a couple is “A microcosm of the universe trying to repair itself.” then we are assistants to that process.
Thats what Marxists are too.
Strange that the right who advocate market forces somehow believe in the benign power of the market. Leave alone. Marxists might trust the market too if it was alive in a society that was free of the distortions of the capitalists. It would tend towards each to his needs. Just like in couple therapy – in my room I have to be a strong dictatorship of the eros forces. We fight the cultural conserves (part of the current cultural forces) of blame – attack and control.
See more search the Tag – theory of change https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/tag/theory-of-change/
Earth Crosses
| The way up and the way down are one and the same – Heraclitus |
I have these up somewhere from years ago, but I’m not maintaining that site.
The Survival Dance that gets in the way of the Encounter
We flee or fight to avoid pain. In psychodrama we call those ways of being the coping roles. The path to the progressive, being fully alive, is to be with the vulnerability of the pain and attend to it. This can’t really be done alone, yet no-one can do it for you.
This is a universal idea and present in many modalities.
*
The title of this post comes from Hedy Schleifer’s ECcT – Encounter Centred Couple Therapy. On her website she says:
“I want them to leave knowing that the “survival dance’ that they have been dancing for such a long time is “not’ who they are in their essence.”
Continue reading “The Survival Dance that gets in the way of the Encounter”
The Ecology of Psychology
The whole field of mental health, therapy, personal and family therapy is like a huge forest. There are the big trees that provide the canopy. Many species of those from very different families. Then layers of stuff that goes right down to the rare fungi and microscopic little weird things that are not even classified. Occasionally some hardy species will find its way to the sunlight above the canopy and bloom.
As part of the ecology of philosophies, methods, theories, schools and breakaway schools there are the regulating bodies, some governmental and some tied in with professional organisations. There are external factors influencing the cycle like in any ecosystem, education systems, insurance systems and political realities. Epidemics are not uncommon and the whole ecosystem is evolving, rapidly, fuelled by waves of things that go viral on the Internet, by marketing strategies and new inventions.
Is it just nature with everything in its own niche, something we can admire as mirroring the complexity of the human psyche? I think Jung said that somewhere.
Or is it a process which, on the one hand, is full of weeds taking us down false pathways towards violence and war or to isolation and continuation of madness and on the other hand there maybe species struggling to to survive that could be part of assisting humanity to survival. Are there some things that are more progressive than others?
The question is a bit like the debate about regulation and the market.
Who Shall Survive?
Osho
We binge watched Wild Wild Country with great interest.
I have been intrigued by Bagwhan since the 1980s. I went quite a few workshops in Freemantle, Western Australia… but never drank the cool-aid. No orange or mala. I knew there was controversy in Oregon. Just how awful it was is news to me. What went wrong? Guns for one thing. I hated that turn of events. Sheila?
I watched a short Osho video on YouTube and saw it clearly… Bagwhan is not really the problem as a person either… it is his philosophy!
What a lovely response to the journalists question “what is the purpose of all this?” Anything that has a purpose is mundane. His answer is really an deep reflection on ends and means. The philosopher shines thorough.
But there is an ugly side. He becomes a little scathing of the questioner. He is not “one of my people”. He is an outsider. And there it is, disdain for outsiders. With all the ‘enlightenment’ they could not relate to 50 locals. They took over that town in an arrogant way akin to the way those people had taken it from the native Americans. If they are not “my people” then they are not people at all.
That is the lesson for me in the whole thing… I know I can have that sort of disdain.
Human nature
Wikipedia:
However, in the sixth Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Marx criticizes the traditional conception of human nature as a species which incarnates itself in each individual, instead arguing that the conception of human nature is formed by the totality of social relations. Thus, the whole of human nature is not understood, as in classical idealist philosophy, as permanent and universal: the species-being is always determined in a specific social and historical formation, with some aspects being biological.
This shows how Marx is not part of the individualism – not surprising as individualism is something that arises most fully in the capitalist era. The roots are there in Christianity and Buddhism. It is with Marx we see a shift in consciousness.
This is part of a current wave of meditation I seem to be going through on human nature. I’ve been stuck by the two essentialisms: Humans are inherently greed or inherently good. Marx’s idea is very freeing… Humans are a product of their social conditions. And it makes sense of his thinking that different classes produce different ideas. Ideas grow out of practice in social conditions.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/communism-and-fascism-the-reason-they-are-so-similar
This is such a flawed way of seeing it – Pinker!
Related:
Moreno – roles create the personality. (Lynette Clayton)
Hendrix – the self is born in relationship.
It also relates to “truth” we find it in the ‘theatre of truth’ – theatre is social. Esp psychodrama.