Pychodrama question

[Adam Blatner]

Responding to your question: 'Is Psychodrama an appropriate method when dealing with adolescents who have social and emotional problems?' 
        Dear Ms Gooding (using Cartmell's email?) 

                  There is no appropriate method, and there should be no appropriate (single) method, and the category of "adolescents who have social and emotional problems" is as broad and inclusive of important sub-types as the categories with the names "people" or "sickness."  I view psychodrama as a complex of tools that may be added to the tools presently being used. As an analogy to carpentry, there are tools, and then there are a new set of tools driven by electricity, or involving electricity (such as certain testing tools), or addressing the electrical system of whatever is being built. There is also a vast range of what carpentry can be used for, from a hotel or business to private home to furniture to a finely-wrought jewel-box, with goals ranging from functionality to beauty. 
        Similarly, psychodrama is akin to those tools powerered by electricity. (The equivalent dimension in the psycho-social laboratory that is psychodrama is the power of the imagination, the magic if, what Moreno called "surplus reality," all the things you can do in drama, such as re-play a scene, role reverse, stop a scene in mid-performance and reflect, and so forth---hundreds of techniques.)

      From this and other perspectives---and if this is a serious thesis of yours, it's worth not only reading the papers on my website, but buying my book, Foundations of Psychodrama 4th edition---it is important for the general fields of psychotherapy to recognize that we have reached a point where no single approach or method can hope to suffice. That era, in the mid-1950s, when different approaches "competed," is obsolete, like the era in the 18th Century when different theories of illness and treatment competed. We now live in an era in which it is clear that almost every method has something positive, fresh, actual to contribute; has certain ideas and techniques that can be woven in, applied when indicated, integrated for an individual treatment plan.

      For example: Healing should be recognized as not just addressing the stress-inducing sources of psychopathology, but also the relative lack, neglect, deficiency of the many positive resources, mental "vitamins," emotional nutrients, that many if not most people with any sort of disorder---and 2/3 of the so-called-"normal" population are also deficient in!--- and therefore healing should involve building up the many sources of coping and resilience.

     Also, I question that psychotherapy by itself without adjustments to the overall social situation, the inadequacies of the educational system, the misleading confusions of much that goes by the name of religion, the economic blocks, the highly misleading mass media, and so forth. In Feminist therapy, it is recognized that part of the problem is this larger social system and that healing includes group consciousness raising. When a group becomes aware of the types of oppression it has been suffering under, that awareness begins to transform "oppression" from a mindless condition of life to certain identified social norms that need to and can be challenged. 

    The appropriate method is to identify through a process of diagnosis---not finding a label, that's "nosology,"--- but really finding out, understanding, what the issues are in this versus that person. They are often very different. A has been socially conditioned by a peer group and slum environment to live according to a code of violence and near-sociopathy. (Is that "emotional disturbance"?  B is an oversensitive kid who has had to bury her feelings so that she can appear tough, but her problems take the form of any range of more specific symptoms---anorexia, self-cutting, etc.  Many kids are co-morbid, meaning they compound whatever their problems are by having more than one---often addiction or semi-addiction, etc. But in addition to diagnosing pathology, what's essential is to identify also the strengths---see the paper on my website on "the real diagnostic variables"--- treatment alliance, psychological mindedness, ego strength, and types of resources.

   What is needed, then, is for you to participate in helping the larger profession and your teachers (who have a vested interest in maintaining the authority of the expertise in knowing a bunch of outmoded or limited theories) to make the paradigm shift that medicine has made, from competing theories to a general field in which all innovations eventually are tested and, if effective, integrated. 

    What do you think of this response?   Warmly, Adam Blatner (have you visited my website and read the papers there?) 

P.S. It's interesting, you from England, and all, that the tendency towards familiarity in speech has filtered down so that you would address a professor or doctor from another country, a complete stranger, by his first name. Although far from stuffy and inclined to invite people to address me by my first name once we have established a relationship, I am part of a generation where the stranger or other party had the prerogative of making a relationship a little less formal. Perhaps these differences no longer apply. I confess that in other relationships, I've encountered other younger people who do this: Nurses who call into a waiting room not by the last name, "Mr. Smith, Mrs. Jones," but by the first name; strangers on the telephone seeking a donation, etc. Still, for folks in my generation---and I wonder how it is true for other generations---this is mildly to strongly offensive, indicating a lack of respect. Has anyone ever brought this up for discussion?  I worked and lived in England around 1970 and got the impression that formality in relationships was a little more established. -- AB    

       
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Cartmell P 
  To: adam at blatner.com 
  Sent: Monday, November 30, 2009 4:35 AM
  Subject: Pychodrama question


  Dear Adam,

   

  I am currently studying for a BA in Theatre and Performance at Plymouth University. On completion of my degree I want to complete a MA in Drama Therapy at The Iron Mill in Exeter. I therefore proposed the following question, for my dissertation: 'Is Psychodrama an appropriate method when dealing with adolescents who have social and emotional problems?' , if you could take the time to give your views on this question, I would be most grateful. 

   

  Many thanks, 

  Emma Gooding

   

  emmahookway at yahoo.com
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