Action therapists

[Bud Weiss]

Dear James:I think I recall that Freud and the Freudians who took on the
passive behind the patient on the couch position did so not because they
wanted the patient to focus more on their words and not actions. They rather
did so because Freud became frightened by one or more of his patients who
became arroused by and towards him. Freud took patients on outings and into
his home. He was in fact very effective as an action therapist himself.

I think one of the traps of psychodramatists is to get high on the action
part and not on the real resolution in which both specific actions and very
specific healing phrases need to be uttered.  Too often, I have seen touted
psychodramatists produce tremendous action with huge amounts of tears and
sturm and drung without real resolution. The bad guys are punished, the
protagonist stands up to the future ones and everyone applauds with some
usual back references to Daddy or mom or grandparents who started the whole
thing dismissing them after scolding them for having done such a terrible
job.

For me, there is no resolution until you have in one way or another healed
all those you consider having been wounded by.  You must go through the
process of healing and in a real sense honoring them as part of you and
taking them into yourself so to speak in that healed way. Only then you can
more fully accept all of you and all the strengths you have gained from
those wounds, and end up healing yourself.  Healer first heal thyself.  That
doesn't mean screaming at and hitting pillows and auxiliaries until they and
their images give in.

Milton Erickson used trance to complete that picture, leading people with
his incredible ability with words. Others have done similarly so.
Psychoanalists who end up analyzing over and over the pathological
interjects never really get there. The power in a person is their ability to
actually heal those bad guys and gals.
This is the medicine of Africa as various ceremonies and rituals are about
healing those Ancestors who have gone awry.
This is precisely where Constellation work focuses and achieves such
enormous reverberations for all involved.  Psychodrama has the ability to do
the same and I think even more once what the Constellation folks call the
Knowing field is accessed and people become attuned to our ability to grasp
that extra sense and space within the space we occupy from which all actions
may be generated.

Be well, Bud

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 10:20 PM, James Sacks <jmsacks at mindspring.com>wrote:

>  I want to make clear for those who did not read the message from which
> the lines in the message below were excerpted that I am not critical of
> action therapists. Rather I am critical of any therapists that unnecessarily
> negate whole spheres of human capabilities from therapy.This was the
> complete passage:
>
>  Psychoanalysts usually are people who are comfortable listening and seeing
> deeply into the meaning of what they hear. Some are brilliant at it. They
> are less good at doing, so and they hang back from it and may discourage it
> in their patients. Their passivity fits many of their personalities. We may
> be just the opposite and propel ourselves and our patients into action even
> when thinking and understanding are more called for. People are naturally
> drawn into professions that require skills they have and consider of less
> importance professions that especially require  behavior that create anxiety
> as we know psychodrama does. Psychodrama can frighten, not only patients but
> therapists as well. Our task is to acknowledge an help allay this anxiety
> among our patients and also among our colleagues.
>
> As critical as I was of the '"words only" therapists, I did not want evade
> self-examination lest we fall into the "action only" mode. When a
> quasi-religious charismatic group leader uses psychodramatic techniques to
> lead members to preordained actions we find the seeds of Jonesville rather
> than mental health.
>
> Traditionally, the attempt had been to impose passivity by placing patients
> supine on a couch with the single rule of putting in words whatever goes
> through their minds. The hope was that any impulses other than words would
> be be frustrated and instead be funnelled into language which could be
> understood and used by the therapist. As psychodramatists we know what
> occurs when action is included in therapy. Massive amounts of
> therapeutically significant material in workable form is exposed which would
> be very unlikely to arise by free association alone. Therapists can
> understand more than just words.
>
> Moreno once (or many times) said that you can put many couches on a stage
> but you can't put many stages on a couch. The idea is that there are many
> doors to the psyche. A person can move, talk, think, emote, dream, effect
> psychosomatic changes, et al. Each door out can also be a door in and we
> would foolish to omit any point of entry in our therapeutic efforts. I do
> not think that he was pro-action and anti-speech. After all, speech is a
> form of action, too, and he did an awful lot of speaking and writing
> himself. It is just that action had been specifically disallowed in the
> conventional psychiatry at the time. There were growing Nazi and Communist
> movements in German speaking countries so that flying into action before a
> great deal of serious consideration was actually dangerous. But Moreno found
> a good trick - pretending - or what we call psychodrama. It allowed for
> action without danger.
>
> Jim Sacks
>
> Adam's message :
>
>  Jim Sacks said,in an email recently to grouptalk, "[Psychodramatists may
> tend] to propel ourselves and our patients into action even when thinking
> and understanding are more called for.
>
> Interesting. Point I think needs to be underlined is that there are times
> when thinking and understanding, discussion and review, verbal processing,
> not action, are more appropriate for the needs of the client.
>
>
>
>
>
>  Psychodrama can frighten, not only patients but therapists as well. Our
> task is to acknowledge an help allay this anxiety among our patients and
> also among our colleagues.
>
>         It is worth finding out what evokes wariness among colleagues...
>
>
>
>
>
> Adam Blatner, M.D.
>
>    website: www.blatner.com/adam/
>
>
> Grouptalk mailing list
> List at grouptalkweb.org
> http://grouptalkweb.org/mailman/listinfo/list_grouptalkweb.org
>
>


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