response to Ivo re Moreno's greatness
Jenny Wilson
jenny at blennerhassett.gen.nz
Mon Apr 13 16:58:42 CDT 2009
Hello Ivo and Adam
I have been following your conversation with great interest. As a
student of psychodrama I love the method and know it works however I
have found the writing of Moreno most disappointing. Flashes of
brilliance but lacking coherence and unable to answer my many questions.
So I have found Moreno's ideas not misleading as such but incomplete. I
am sure that most psychodramatists will be able to answer the following
questions but each will give a different answer and will be drawing on
theory other than Moreno's. ( Or perhaps I will be surprised and
delighted and find that hidden in the volumes of Moreno's work there is
more clarity than I have been able to find - if so please send references!
If we call psychodrama a type of therapy then that would suggest
healing or (dare I say it - treatment)
If we are healing then WHAT are we healing? and HOW does the healing
process occur? (I am looking for more than techniques and case studies
here - principles, explanations, testable ideas, underlying the healing
process)
What goes wrong to make people become unwell, not function, not cope ?
(I can find no more than a paragraph or two about personality becoming
normally divided - only the merest hint of a theory)
So I guess I am looking for a theory of psychopathology which may be
completely counter to the spirit of psychodrama but kind of essential in
todays therapy world.
These are not just academic questions. They have profound implications
in practical matters such as the contract we have with clients,
relationships with funders and treatment providers and perhaps
eventually with the survival of psychodrama as a therapy modality
(rather than say an educational or personal growth medium). In a recent
survey of 2000 American psychotherapists the top 10 influential therapy
figures were nominated. Sadly Moreno didn't even get a mention. Those
that did make the top ten have all had influential writing and books to
support them - books that are accessible and contain a fair amount of
solid theory.
Regards
Jenny Wilson
(Christchurch Trainee)
PS At this moment I feel like the little boy who says "the Emperor has
no clothes"! I await response with some trepidation.
Ivo Banaco wrote:
> Can you be more specific then. With all your experience can you make a
> list of say 5 main misleading Moreno's ideas. I really want to know.
>
> AB - "If that is seen as insufficiently reverent, sigh, well, too bad"
> - if with this you are trying to say that my e-mail shows that you are
> wrong, as I'm not the reverent type of person, with due respect.
>
> Best,
> Ivo
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 3:41 PM, Adam Blatner <ablatner at verizon.net
> <mailto:ablatner at verizon.net>> wrote:
>
> Ivo, I'm sorry my point seemed pejorative. The recognition of
> a statistical distribution of talents, skills, development of
> roles, etc. is meant to suggest a balanced perspective. For
> example, in my efforts to advocate for a balanced perspective, I
> may have some positive aspects, such as articulateness, and I may
> have some negative aspects, so that my tone seems to annoy some
> folks. I try to correct this, but it isn't easy.
>
> Moreno was brilliant in many ways, and because his
> contributions are so generative of other potentialities, I
> consider him great. Yet the problem is also to be capable of
> reviewing his writing and career more objectively, and to realize
> in what way his style of interpersonal and organizational
> behavior not only interfered with the acceptance of his ideas, but
> also to consider the possibility that some of his thousands of
> ideas might be incomplete, misleading, or flat wrong. Idealization
> is the mental short-cut that overgeneralizes on virtues. Example:
> If my daddy is nice to me and buys me a birthday present, he must
> be the greatest, so I feel betrayed when, say, he loses his
> job. Is he not the greatest?
>
> The problem is not that of avoiding throwing out the baby
> with the bathwater; it's avoiding making any discriminations and
> throwing out neither baby nor bathwater. The spirit of
> creativity means that we do not rely (uncritically) on the
> cultural conserve. I believe in building on and occasionally
> revising Moreno's work, rather than making it a sacred text that
> must be followed blindly.
> If that is seen as insufficiently reverent, sigh, well, too
> bad. -- warmly, adam
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> *From:* Ivo Banaco <mailto:ibanaco at gmail.com>
> *To:* grouptalk Listserv <mailto:list at grouptalkweb.org>
> *Sent:* Monday, April 13, 2009 6:34 AM
> *Subject:* On Blatner's account of feet of clay
>
> In one of the thoughts that Adam Blatner share with us, here
> in Grouptalk he said (hope not taking this out of the context,
> I think I'm not):
>
> "what if our leaders have this same (really quite normal)
> distribution of role skills. What do we do when we find our
> leader, our pioneer, our elder, our ideal, has faults? Do we
> see Moreno, for example, as having feet of clay? That metaphor
> implies the entire edifice of his good ideas is based on his
> weaknesses, and as they are exposed, so falls the edifice. Or
> what if we grant (using a different metaphor) that many if not
> most heroes were heroic or genius or really pretty good in
> some ways and in other ways may exhibit character flaws,
> inconsistencies, what we see now as hypocrisy (How could
> Thomas Jefferson have kept slaves?!), etc.?"
>
> I felt this point uncomfortable to me so I waited a while to
> see what was this feeling all about. This is what I found and
> wanted to share with you all.
>
> I do think that JL Moreno and all genius for that matter have
> "feet of clay" in some particular sense. What I’ m not sure is
> that my sense is the same than Blatner’s used here, which I
> found particularly pejorative. I'll explain:
>
> It seems to me clear that Moreno built all his career as an
> antithesis (in Hegel and Fitche sense) of the establishment of
> the epoch. And why? Difficulty to adaptation? Certainly. But
> is that all? That is why I felt uncomfortable about words like
> feet of clay, flaws, inconsistencies, weaknesses. It brings
> pejorative sense of the struggle of the human being to grow.
> And Growth is a main issue for human beings and, by far, the
> less well understand issue for all of us. Despite all the
> brilliant theories, particularly since Darwin, we simply don't
> know exactly how and why do we develop as human beings, as
> culture and as society. Our own vulnerabilities could be a
> major strength if we used them to grow, enhancing the creative
> forces and reducing possible destructive forces in to play.
>
> In some accounts of evolutionary theories it is said that
> Evolution itself only occurs if necessary. For instance, the
> reptiles are so well adapted to their environment that there
> is no significant push to evolve further. When we think in
> this continuum between species, having human beings as the
> most evolved specie in some consciousness taxonomy (it’s
> important to be aware of the scale that we are measuring
> evolution), we can make speculations about how far away we and
> our environment are far from some kind of adaptation like the
> one showed by other animals.
>
> OK, I am missing my point here. What I’m saying is that, in my
> opinion, it’s beside the point to realize that genius have
> weaknesses. We don’t want to throw our baby with the
> bathwater. What we must know and be conscious of is the fact
> that there are no such thing as perfection and the brighter
> the light the greater the shadow.
>
> All the best,
>
> Ivo
>
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