Saving the world and the paradox of urgency

[thana ag]

Hi Regina,

 I so agree with you that it we recognize our input at therapists: to the social being of the society: to remember that any input on  personal level contributes  concretely to the big picture,and worth more that all the "calls for action"  in the future...

In Judaism (kaballah), to save  one soul is  to save the whole world.

Anath
 


From: sewell.2 at osu.edu
To: List at grouptalkweb.org
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 2009 11:44:03 -0400
Subject: Saving the world and the paradox of urgency
CC: ablatner at verizon.net

Adam,

Oddly, given my background as a sociologist, I totally believe that therapy is (or can be) a form of social action.  If the therapist/counselor/person on the other end listening empathetically and possibly offering reality checks, connects the individual's condition to the social context, it is totally social action.  When I answered the rape crisis line and told caller after caller who had been raped or was struggling with the fact that a girlfriend or child had been raped that what happened wasn't his or her fault..  that he or she didn't make it happen...   and while there are things that might be good to do differently (like not drink a bottle of vodka) that the perpetrator is ultimately responsible for their own behavior and choices..  This was huge and is huge....  

And while our tools don't really "get people to write letters, talk to their congress people, or protest" they do build community and help people shape their own identities.  Turns out that people participate in social movements based on identity and on community membership.  

It's also important to conceede that our solutions will be the next problem (the simplified version of Marx's dialectic)..  in real terms - prohibition actually did reduce drinking AND also opened a wonderful opportunity for ne'er do wells to make a fortune.  The car was origionally thought of as a solution to pollution...   all those horses had to poop and the poop was a problem.  Cars don't poop visisble shit....   so it took folks awhile to figure it out....

I think one of the more important things we can do is help people calm down.  Running on urgent, "they sky is falling, the sky is falling" leads to really dumb solutions (cash for clunkers...  great pollitically but really....   dumb idea in a lot of ways per a number of economists/ hand outs w/out boundaries to the financial industry who them rewarded the very people who got us into trouble in the first place with bonuses and / or spent a fortune on that "retreat like" weekend on the tax payers dime).  The trick is to help ground people so that they can make informed decisions and practical life changes, so that they can explore concepts addressed in "Your money or your life" (I don't like the book as a scholar - lots of unfounded generalizations, but the points - at the essential core - are sound.)  We can help people move past their fear and guilt, their shame and their anger using sociodrama and psychodrama.  We can help people imagineer...   visualize what could be.  This is a very sound principal in the martial arts.  You don't hit the board, you visualize yourself hitting through the board and the board snaps easily.  If you hit the board, you can break your hand.  Same w/ baseball...   look toward where you want the balll to go.  If you look to right field, it will go there.  

Peace,
regina sewell, ph.d.


<<Okay, let's see. The world is in trouble in thousands of different ways at many levels. What can "sociatry" do? Which methods are useful with groups beyond the sick role? (i.e., beyond psychotherapy). 
      1. Starting small: Consider the feminist notion that the personal is political and reverse it. In the 1970s the institution of the happy nuclear family was questioned. Might it for some be a prison?  Questioning social arrangements is one example. Could therapy include social action? Groups whose task is to change more than the consciousness of its own members generate new types of group dynamics, concerning as how best to accomplish its chosen tasks.

     2. Recognize that sociometry and psychodramatic methods constitute at most only 23.2% of the many different kinds of skills and knowledge involved in social action. Things like composing an effective letter, lobbying, etc. --- there are hundreds or thousands of such components that transcend any particular discipline--- including the skill bases of rhetoric, advertising, spin-doctoring, propaganda, all the elements of politics, lobbying, newsletter editing, community organizing, etc. etc.

     3. In a larger sense, much of politics throughout history (including some military efforts) have been rationalized as promoting what was for the time viewed as an improvement on the previous system. For example, feudalism, as prone to tyrrany as at was, was nevertheless believed to be an improvement of some degree of order and predictability, better than what had been happening in the earlier "dark ages" in which people felt far too vulnerable to robbers, invaders, and pure barbarism.  In other words:

   4. The problem with sociatry is the problem with fascism: The doctor-patient model of the 1940s (relating to the -iatros Greek root meaning physician) involved a wise knower-how-to-diagnose and treat and a submissive patient. This does not apply well to large social groupings. It is not at all clear that anyone knows how to fix it all and can garner adequate consensus for "I'll just tell you what to do and then you take this medicine and follow my 'orders.' type of management. 
         I'm just noting that the word may be misleading. The spirit Moreno advocated is something I share: Let's apply what we're learning in psychology, sociology, and every other field to efforts in every institution---political, educational, economic, clubs, recreation, medicine, etc. I saw his idea as an interdisciplinary vision during an era in which fields were more compartmentalized. Ed's advocacy of social action has merit, but awaiting specifics, I'm not sure that our field has more to offer than other fields. It certainly has some to offer, though!

   5. I'm continuing to do adult education classes and weaving in principles from role theory, the idea of externalization and personification of defenses (i.e., imagining that they can be played, given voice, imagined to be little seductive con-men, little Bernie Madoffs or whoever). , and other Morenian ideas along with the contributions of others--- all part of the aforementioned idea of "psychological literacy" or promoting the continued integration of the insights of psychology in life.
           (In a larger sense, I think sociatry refers in large part to this cultural trend towards bringing psychology into the mainstream of culture rather than its having operated at the periphery as a semi-irrelevant procedure for folks at the margins of society)

  6. Writing, publishing, presenting at other conferences, and talking about how psychodramatic and sociometric methods might have applications beyond its own field... I think these are small but not meaningless efforts. A measure of humility is okay. 

   7. Continuing efforts (and modeling) in integrating good ideas from other fields will also help to break down perceptions of psychodrama as somewhat insular. 

   Those are a few things perhaps that can advance the idea of our field's relevance to social activism. 
            The targets include not only global warming (as Ed noted), but thousands of other worthy causes.

        Some of these, interestingly, are complex: The question regarding health care for me, for example, is to what degree I support the present kluged-together bill or exert myself for the cause of a single-payer system (as supported by the Physicians for a National Health Plan)?  It could be argued that in the present climate, a compromise is necessary and that single-payer has zero chance. On the other hand, the present bill is so fraught with compromises that it will be unsatisfactory in many ways, the problem will "heat up" further, and more radical surgery will be frustrated because "we already tried socialized medicine"  (when in fact we only put our toe in the water, so to speak).   So political decision-making is a problem in weighing which tactic to use in the interim. 
regina sewell, Ph.D.

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