A sociatric vision

[Jenny Wilson]

Dear Adam
Thank you for your very full response to my comments/questions. I will
take time to digest them. I am now reading some more including re
reading some of your writing and will get back to you soon. I appreciate
your invitation to ask questions get responses and realise that there
are different questions/ new questions - somehow an important and
helpful process for me.
kind regards
Jenny



Adam Blatner wrote:
> 
> Responses:
>   JW in New Zealand:  I am reminded me how deeply I am seeped in the
> culture of academic learning, research, journals, medical model etc. and
> wondering how much of my struggle with psychodrama theory is due to my
> inablity to role reverse with Moreno and his culture.
>       AB: Too easy a response. This whole business must be dissected
> meticulously. Moreno had many pretensions to scholarship, and also felt
> okay about dispensing with some scholarly conventions. We should not
> eliminate the possibility that he was a brilliant seminal thinker---a
> genius---while at the same time being a mediocre (at best) systematic
> thinker. His clear narcissism also made him shameless about the defects
> in his writings. Ed S. finds gems of brilliance in his almost
> Talmudically-careful studies of Moreno's writing, and I await his (Ed's)
> not just quoting them, but explaining why they are gems, how they are
> more than mere platitudes or overgeneralized aspirations. In my opinion,
> there are indeed some gems there and also some stuff that is more mixed.
> 
> JW: My questions about theory do arise in a medical model, academic
> psychology context. As in my earlier post I am looking for theories/
> explanations for psychopathology and somehow even though I KNOW that
> these may not be psychodrama appropriate questions I can't help to try
> and work this out.
>     AB: I agree with you heartily: We must be prepared to present our
> ideas in a coherent fashion to those who are not already bent on
> agreeing with us.
> 
>    JW  These are the questions that my academic colleagues (who are
> curious and interested in psychodrama) ask me. The clients I see are
> referred in a medical model context - depressed, anxious, etc.:
>        1.  Phrases such as "social atom repair" as used in our recent
> ANZPA conference brochure are quite mysterious and provoked an
> interesting tea room discussion. Social atom, cultural
> atom,social-cultural atom. One construct or two? No two writers give it
> the same definition according  to one thesis I read recently, and how to
> explain it to a naive audience?
> 
> AB: Social Atom and similar terms should be noted to be only mental
> constructs aimed at trying to describe the way people are embedded in
> their social environment. The wording here is very possibly misleading.
> Calling it an atom is problematical because there are many aspects of
> and associations to the physical - chemical concept of atom that don't
> fit. Pitirm Soroking criticized Moreno's concept this way, but I can't
> find the exact reference. Even my preferred phrase, social network
> diagram, is a little misleading because while the central character may
> be connected, and a few of the others variably connected with each
> other, most figures on the social network diagram don't know each other,
> so then it's not really a NET work, is it?
> 
>   Secondly, there is no network, any more than there is a "self" or an
> ego as differentiated from superego. These compartments are created as
> mental abstractions of organismic (non-material) dynamic wholes, purely
> for convenience in analysis. This is okay if we remember that these are
> temporary tools. The human body really doesn't operate with separate
> organs (lungs over here, heart there), but rather as an integrated
> whole---as does the mind, as does the person in the socius. The child
> psychoanalyst Winnicott once said, "There's no such thing as a baby,"
> meaning that it is foolish to envision an individual apart from the
> profoundly interactive caretaker environment.
> 
> There are several ways of using the social atom as a diagnostic or
> therapeutic tool. One type includes the major attachments. (Who has been
> unintentionally omitted?) Another type extends this or modifies it: Who
> are the groups, collectives with whom one relates. The diagram can be
> used with a good deal of flexibility and creativity. It's a tool, like a
> scissors. There is no single right way to use it. As for definitions,
> say simply it's a map of the person in relation to his or her social
> matrix.
> 
> JW: If we are repairing it then is it broken?
> AB: Metaphors, semantics, words. Hold these as tools, use when they help
> communications; put down and try other ways when they hinder them. Do
> not take any of this---and until I can be reasonably criticized with
> good arguments I'll say "any"---anything not only in psychodrama or in
> psychology---as literal, because the mind can not be treated like a
> thing. One might even go so far as to argue that no thing should be
> treated only as defined, because we continue to discover new frontiers
> (and surpass those frontiers) about what anything "is." (sorry for the
> venture into metaphysics.)
>        But use it. Repairing a broken social network is not a bad
> opening title sentence, but there are a host of sub-headings:
> Breaks that are irreparable. Neither partner wants to
> Breaks that are reparable but neither partner knows how to
> Breaks that maybe are... but more diagnosis as to what the nature of the
> break, hurt, misunderstanding, betrayal, mixed tele, etc. is about---and
> this can be quite complex. Each role component may need to be examined.
>         One may find six healthy role complementarities, three of which
> can be brought to bear to heal the one or two incompatibilities, for
> example. But these, too, depend on how valued or important they are to
> either party, etc.
>         and so forth..
> 
> JW  how did it get broken or what goes wrong that it needs repairing?
> what exactly are you  repairing? And are you really repairing or simply
> adding to or increasing something else (spontaneity?)
>         AB: See above. It's important that we not use sponatneity too
> casually as a panacea. More often than not it's a vague abstraction in
> the minds of those using the term. I no longer assume that my colleagues
> in the professions really know what they're talking about, because I've
> too often asked innocent questions for further explanations and receive
> in response that kind of annoyance that expresses the disorganized rage
> suffered by a narcissistic complex that's just been punctured.
> 
> JW  On the topic of roles. Should we describe roles from the context of
> the observer of from the point of view from the person experiencing
> them, or both if indeed in a drama it is all the internal world of the 
> protagonist?
>      AB: excellent question: The advantage of role is that it is a most
> convenient tool when used well. Yet it can't be used for certain things.
> A spoon is great, but not a good cutting instrument. So, in your
> question, role is a tool for identifying a complex. It doesn't exist,
> and has no clear boundary. It's good for describing and discussing, but
> absolutely imprecise. This is because roles partake of levels, levels
> above and below in complexity (e.g. student: above: specific relations
> with teachers, more general relations with the educational institution,
> not-insignificant relations with the wider political institutions within
> which a school operates, culture, prejudices, language, etc.; below,
> temperament, psychophysical makeup, intrapsychic introjects --inner
> parents--- various conflicts with other roles (e.g., wanting to be out
> sailing), etc.)
>        So we should not describe roles. Rather we should identify them
> as is deemed useful by the client, or by the therapists in a case
> conference, for purposes of understanding. So all angles you mentioned
> are appropriate depending on purpose of the interaction.
> 
> Saying it another way: It is impossible---absolutely impossible---to
> describe a person. There are literally hundreds of major variables and
> thousands of permutations, and a third of these are changing in
> intensity or quality even as we speak. So the delusion that psychology
> can describe anything needs to be confronted. On the other hand, for
> purposes of growing, learning, healing, temporary, provisional
> descriptions are better than swimming in an amorphous mush, and to this
> end I find role theory to be the most user-friendly, flexible, and
> suggestive language for psychology currently available.
> 
> JW: Does it matter?
>   AB: Unclear on your question. Sometimes it is most useful to identify
> the factors. But sometimes it doesn't matter, because identifying roles
> or analyzing them may be irrelevant to what's actually needed, such as
> time to be quiet, without words; or opportunities to re-ground with
> presence.
> 
>  JW  At what point does the mean, critical, beastly mother become the
> stressed unhappy mother struggling to cope the best way she can or is
> that all one role?
>    AB: Good question. The key word is "is." Nobody "is" anything.
> Everything must be approached in terms of identifying the relevant
> question. We're talking epistemology here, how do we know anything. In
> the olden days (last week?) lots of people thought that (1) it was
> possible to identify things clearly; and (2) if you knew what something
> "was" you'd know what to do about it. Both are untrue: They rest on the
> vague, childish desires to get, have, hold, possess, attain, be done
> with it, once and for all---and the cosmos resists this by being in
> continual flux and development.  Otherwise erudite people get trapped by
> this folly.
>         So back to your question.
>  There is a time in therapy when it is useful to help a client
> experience her victimization, to recognize the nature of the wound. Yes,
> in a certain sense, that was a beastly thing for mother to do.
> 
>      There is another time, after that, when it is useful to help a
> client transcend the victimization, to redeem empowerment and
> responsibility. In that phase, it's important (and often therapists miss
> doing this) to help clients role reverse and see their antagonists, such
> as the mother who delivered a mixed bag of messages for all sorts of
> reasons, as real people, because learning to forgive, release, and
> re-own the ability to self-nurture is what is needed next.
> 
>           (But perhaps I didn't understand your question?)
> 
>   JW  When a person is experiencing a role conflict are they in two
> roles or one? can you experience two roles simultaniously?
>                 Almost everyone almost all the time are "experiencing"
> multiple roles. They're like computer sub-programs, with some running in
> the background, using up RAM space. I estimate that people live out
> about twenty major and a hundred minor roles at any one time along with
> about a thousand transient roles that kick in and go out in the course
> of a year. What do others think?
>         Now as to what you "experience," that has to do with capacity
> for attention, scanning, inner sensitivity, focus, etc.
>    I think the key to growth is multi-tasking, and more specifically
> being able to be the figurative director-playwright even as one is being
> the actor. Or being the actor-as-character even as the actor has some
> role distance so that she can play the role slightly differently in the
> next run-through of the scene. The cultivation of the choosing
> self---the meta-role, as I describe in my chapter in Advancing
> Theories---is in my mind the key to effective therapy.
> 
> JW  I know I have a lot of questions (some of which must seem quite odd).
>          AB: You may or may not want to examine your external
> projections, why you think someone else would find anything you've
> presented even a little bit odd, much less quite. ...    I thought they
> were pretty good questions.
> 
> JW  I don't really expect anyone to answer all my questions ...
>      AB. Again external projections. I find this a pleasant dialogue and
> in turn am open to disagreements, probing further questions, and so
> forth. Nor do I presume to think that my "answers" will fully answer
> your questions, because (1) I may have misunderstood them; (2) you may
> have presented them ambiguously; (3) I might be simply wrong, or at
> least only partly right; (4) (and here's the best part), in any
> dialogue, as certain questions are posed and answered, new questions
> bubble to the surface: Ah, now I see that what I really needed to ask
> was...
> 
>  JW: ... and am willing to read
>       (AB: please try to find my Foundations of Psychodrama or order it
> for your community's library)
> 
> JW...  and notice and experiment and try and find answers for myself
> but  in Moreno's own writing I end up wading through heaps of material
> that leaves me none the wiser. I think I may be asking him the wrong
> questions!
>         AB: Like the Talmud, I think that Moreno's own writings are the
> most obscure way to learn about psychodrama. More, I don't think that
> anything that he, I, Zerka, or anyone says should be accepted as
> authoritative. The field is young.
> 
>  JW   Perhaps I think too much and am prone to driving myself and others
> crazy with this!!
>        AB: No, the correct diagnosis is that you think. This is
> abnormal. (It's a good kind of abnormality---normality being just what
> most folks do. Normality is not what should be one's highest goal.)
>      Most people only pretend to themselves that they think, but it
> doesn't hit the discomfort zone. Consider the alternative possibility
> that you have a lively mind that naturally notices the inconsistencies
> between status and authority and what these folks have to say.
>     The good news is that you will be on the creative cutting edge.
>          The bad news is that sometimes it gets lonely, and you begin to
> suspect that some of your supports have feet of clay.
>   Be assured, though, that there exist people who will delight in your
> mind and be available to encourage you! You may have to shop around, but
> they're there, and they're looking for playmates like you!
> 
>   Warmly, Adam