Walter Logeman: Journal
I have just updated my psychotherapy online page. Just a tweak here or there, but it is amazing how I want to change it just a little every few months.
I added the words: dream, Jung, Psychodrama and Moreno to my first page. These words sum up my special interests and skill, so the should be there!
George Kelly was influenced by J.L. Moreno Wikipedia. The interesting thing I just learned from my friend Don is that Kelly in turn was an influence on Beck, one of the founders of CBT.
Makes sense, in that the work of Moreno is about the whole person, thoughts, feelings and action, the individual, the collective, the practical, the relational and the cosmic.
In the psychotherapy I do it is useful to move along the continuum of role training on the one hand and the psychological roles and the psychodynamic aspects that Moreno called the psychodramatic.
Category:Psychotherapy – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is a different page than the one that appears under Psychotherapy, which is also useful. This is a Wikipedia “Category” and it shows well how Psychotherapy is just that. Psychotherapy is a category like “tree” then there are many species some very different from others. In New Zealand we have one organization that covers all the various modalities, this is rather unusual in the world, even though there is also a World Council for Psychotherapy WCP (A trip to Beijing in 2008 could be a good thing to do!).
While there are irreconcilable world views behind some of the modalities, they reflect the complexity of the mind & soul. No one modality can really capture it all. My own training was in Psychodrama – which has its strengths but is essentially a group method. My one-to-one work is informed also by my training as a Social Worker and through my experience of personal Jungian Analysis.
A short article: Receiving Sexual Pleasure by Sylvia Rosenfeld, LCSW, again has that Imago reference to “connected knowing”:
The goal of Imago Relationship Therapy is to create the conditions in a relationship that will encourage positive change in partners. The right environment retrains the brain. The behavioral component of sex therapy does this as well. The integration of both therapies can help a couple move from “separate” to “connected” knowing. Dialogue and behavioral assignments, especially sensate focus, create the continual repetition, through words and actions that translate what their “brains” know to what their “hearts” know as well.
I just had a thought that this might be what Psychodramatists call “Role-Reversal” in a sense couples become more empathic as they dialogue, to the point where they have a knowing of each other that goes beyond empathy, they know so many of the dots that it is easy to fill in all the dots (if you get my drift). I can grasp these things more when I can relate them to my primary modality, that is where I learnt things in a visceral way. In Psychodrama the role reversal is enacted where people literally change places and enact the role that the other had. It is an important technique. However it is also used as a way of speaking about an ability people have to step into the shoes of the other. Again to mix modalities, someone with a narcissitic wound can’t role revers – that is the same wound. It is also one of the latest stages of child development, and builds on other skills such as mirroring.
I heard about how in the grieving process for a miscarriage the parent role-reversed with the spirit of the child. They had named the unborn baby Martha. In the role reversal the child revealed many feelings and some gratitude for its brief in utero time on earth. She also made it clear that she did not like the name Martha & would they please change it. What sort of knowing is that!