political themes on grouptalk2

[Adam Blatner]

Dear Ivo, there are several themes here.
    1. Noble aspirations and pronouncements and zealous proclamations about political issues can fill a listserve so fast that everyone will bail out. The real problem is whether or not Morenian methods have anything to offer. 
    2. Unless someone shares very very specific suggestions as to how our approaches may be applied or someone offering a vignette about how something actually was done in a workshop, I'm annoyed by people saying something as vague as
         The world has big problems. Let's do something!  Let's call it sociatry!     
     And naming or describing the problems briefly or at length does nothing to help. 

 3. I definitely am up on the implication of policies---and indeed am preparing some lectures for peers about the history of medicine; one aspect of which is the history of the discovery of nutritional deficiency diseases, and the very specific problems attending this---local and national political and economic efforts to get better foods to the poorer people. Another lecture is about hygiene and the efforts it took to get folks to build privies that didn't allow hookworm larvae to get into the surrounding soil , and the decades of work involved---and it still is a problem in the USA, and a giant problem elsewhere in the tropical world. 
       So it's not a matter of "feeling" political implications. What we're talking about is folly, self-deception, gross ignorance, etc. The remedy as I see it include the following:
       1. The teaching of critical thinking in the schools. I'm preparing lectures about that, and sociodrama is a good tool.
         2. The teaching of emotional intelligence or practical psychology in education and business. I've been suggesting that role playing, sociodrama, and role theory are good tools again for this.
     Relatively little progress has been made so far, and I could use all the help I can get, or perhaps I can help others. But these again are relatively specific problems. (If anyone wants to read the paper on sociodrama in higher education, I'll send it to them. It was in ReVision journal a few years back.)
         And so forth. Other examples of sociatry as I see it are practiced more by the Theatre of the Oppressed theatre artists in this country and around the world. How much do psychodramatists know or care about this method? I think there is a lot of room for synergy and cross-fertilization. Also with Playback Theatre, Bibliodrama, etc. I wonder if everyone on the listservice has at least read about my latest anthology, Interactive & Improvisational Drama   at   www.interactiveimprov.com/  

      But just going into details about the problems is a parental transference: It assumes someone else (i.e. people who "should" know, such as parents, elected officials, etc.) does know and if we just whine and complain they might do something. In fact, others don't know---and for our parents, they most likely didn't know---what else to do. So if you have any specific ideas, go to it. If you don't know either, become a detective, a researcher, a journalist, a networker, but don't just complain on our website, because it only makes us feel helpless, too. 

        Terms like "group transformation" are overgeneralizations, platitudes, worse than useless because unless they're more specifically applied they misleadingly sound as if there's really something to do. Let's say you're right---let's all group transform. Uh, how do we do that, again?---

    I'm saying there's no reluctance at all to move forward to sociatry!  It's not a matter of reluctance, it's a matter of having less than a clue about what specifically to do other than to say, rah rah! Sociatry! Rah rah! Moreno! rah rah. blah blah.

      Now say I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong: Please give me a few very specific actions or things to do that it makes sense to tell others about, to ask others to play with us about, etc. 

     Warmly, Adam
  From: Ivo Banaco 
  To: Kim Cox 
  Cc: Grouptalk Listserv 
  Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2009 6:28 PM
  Subject: Re: political themes on grouptalk


  Dear all,

  We had this discussion before, and I realize how difficult is to people in psychology field to feel the political implications of their knowledge and practices, particularly if we're talking about group transformation (so the question of individual vs group doesn´t really make sense, it's a false question, as there is no individual apart from group and there is no group without politics). The reluctance to move forward to sociatry is the same reluctance that people have with politics (a dirty word, and I certainly understand why...but it is not that politics we mean, it's the real one...). 

  Sociatry is not, as I understand it, a fix and static way of seeing the "cure of society". What is it a typical professional politician anyway if only a courageous sociatrist but with a weak action plan to cure society.  

  I think we will only get to Sociatry if we stop to see every knowledge speciality as a separate thing of the big whole. If we only have the skills to communicate what we know to each other, if we only know to work together not in a simple inter-disciplinary way but in quantum leap forward to a systemic trans-disciplinary approach to life. 

  Is the "psychodrama movement" prepared to get out of its confort zone?


  Genuinely,
  Ivo 
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