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Psychodrama Workshops 2018

I’m delighted to have plans and dates for a bunch of psychodrama events next year.  I hope you will find something of interest!

Psychodrama Weekends with Walter Logeman – Christchurch

Fri, 13 – Sun, 15 April
Fri, 31 August – Sun, 2 September

Experience psychodrama for your personal development!

Download flyer and enrolment details

 

Writing Retreat Mt Lyford – for Psychodrama Trainees

Fri, 25 – Sun 27 May

Writing is an essential part of psychodrama training.

Download flyer     Enrol: http://psychodrama.org.nz/citp-2018c

 

Working With Couples – Professional Development – Christchurch

Christchurch Fri, 6 – Sun, 8 July 2018

This workshop will enrich your work with couples.  Also a good way to get started.

Download Flyer    Enrol: http://psychodrama.org.nz/citp-2018e

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Psychodrama Weekend with Walter Logeman

Just announced a Psychodrama Weekend.  I have conducted many psychodrama weekends and I’m pleased to have warmed up to something new for this one.

As I become more steeped in the relational paradigm everything becomes more relational. While not a workshop specifically for couples this one is “couple friendly”.  I’m conscious how important this is, not just in the flyer but in the actual way I will conduct the group. The relationship is the “third entity”. The relationship can be the protagonist.  And if one partner is the protagonist then there is a specific focus on the other partner as auxiliary.
A small change? Not really.  This is a small expression of a major phenomenon. “Personal Development” is the word we use for these types of workshops. Moreno may never have called them that, he used the word encounter and was always focussing on the relationships more than “the self”.
Any relationship could be the protagonist. Is that what love stories are?  Movies about a couple?  Maybe.  Maybe it is not such a new genre? Love relationships are not any relationship though and there is a qualitative difference between an intimate loving committed relationship and all the rest.  Parent child is another form of relationship that stands out as quite distinct.
As a psychodrama director I am learning new skills.  How to direct a relational drama, where both people are present as themselves.  That is an exploration that I’m right into at the moment.
On NZAP here.
On Meetup here.
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May we have good fortune

In a technological era like ours, the fate and future of the spontaneity principle as a major pattern of culture and living may depend on good fortune in tying it up with technological devices.

Moreno Psychodrama v. 1 p. 403

 

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Back online

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.

~

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.”

Marx 

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Marx

… 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

 

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Disturbing motives

Love the work of Austin Kleon – this is an image from his 2018 Calendar 

If  “the focal conflict model” could be described in a picture, this is it.   The black abyss shows the depth of the concept, and “We” that it is often something we share.  The group is larger than the sum of its parts and can have its own disturbing motives.

Here is a link to the original analytic paper about these matters.

Guilt, Shame, and Other Reactive Motives — Thomas M. French

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Pace Layer Thinking : Theory of Change

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:

~~~

I think of other theories of change:

Needs more explaining but has broad application W = warm-up

~~~

And then there is Dialectics. Not to be dismissed. Hegelian and then Marxist.

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Saving Humanity

In July I found this Kim Hill Interview enlightening. Made me see how we have claimed half the earth and now need that other half to sustain us. We must not touch it!

Johan Rockström – planetary boundaries

“Professor Johan Rockström led the team of scientists who worked out the planetary boundaries framework – nine environmental lines we cannot safely cross if human life is to be sustainable on Earth.”

He won the Hillary Award, and is from the Stockholm Resilience Centre

That must be quite a place! It seems another speaker on Kim Hill recently is also connected with the place:

Will Steffen – the beginner’s guide to the Anthropocene

“He says scientists were “staggered” to discover this acceleration was not related to population growth, but to consumption by the world’s wealthiest countries.”

What a great interview. Cuba avoids its carbon production by investing in health and education!

Linking here as I want to listen again.

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The Fuse Box

I want to get this book.

The Fuse Box: Essays on Writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters – Victoria University Press

I heard about it in this excellent podcast: Kim Hill interviews Emily Perkins — Emily Perkins – Ibsen and The Fuse Box

Thought it might be fun to offer the protagonists in The Dolls House couple therapy.

Later Monday, 23 April, 2018 

I’ve read nearly every item in the book and liked them a lot.  One thing that struck me was how much creative writing talk relates to psychodrama directing.  I’d recommend any director of drama to read the book.  Probably would work for painters or musicians as well.

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Knowledge

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.

~

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:

 

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