role reversal

Mon May 14 12:08:30 CDT 2007

Cleaning up old email after returning from a family visit and other busy-making things...

   Cynthia's point is excellent, and points us at an interesting challenge: How to get 
people to even want to role reverse.
So my first point is that folks avoid doing or thinking what seems too difficult. I find 
this principle far more pervasive and influential than Freud's theory that we're driven by 
libido.
         Corollary: Present folks with ways of learning this skill. Teaching role taking, 
role imagining, role as basis for practical psychology, and the norm or ethical obligation 
of exercising this skill and asking for help in doing so throughout middle and high school 
and college! Sociodrama thus becomes a core subject, as I wrote about in a recent paper.
        Corollary 2. My impression is that few therapists ever expect their clients to 
role reverse with others, especially those who seem to be in the counter-role of 
opponents, authority figures, enemies, difficult people, political opponents, villains, 
etc. Granted that early on, the client's experience must be worked with as it is perceived 
and interpreted; however, later on, at a certain point when the goal becomes that of 
creativity, adaptation, and maturity, perhaps it is time to introduce this as an expected 
norm.
          Otherwise we are colluding with clients in sustaining selfish, egocentric, 
overly-victimized, immature values. Going beyond Karl Menninger's book, "Whatever Became 
of Sin?" (in the 1960s), there may be occasions when therapists should not remain neutral, 
but reflect back when client's attitudes are destructive in the long run to the social 
fabric, immoral, short-sighted, etc.

        2. Another aspect of teaching role reversal is the inclusion of the feedback from 
the person with whom one reverses roles, whenever this is possible. The third party, 
mediator, director, guide, makes this a positive and supportive, encouraging process, 
rather than a reproachful, "No! You didn't get it right!" (the first time)   (I write 
about this dynamic in papers on my website about conflict resolution and mutuality.)

        In addition to teaching the technique, there is the moral point: Celebrate this 
activity as a form of maturity. Refusing to role reverse should be seen as immaturity, 
plain and simple. Pooping in one's pants is a late-infancy type of immaturity. I want it 
now is a early childhood type of immaturity. Egocentricity is a pre-adolescent and early 
adolescent type of immaturity. Simply getting clear on this concept and value and speaking 
about it in a matter of fact fashion might be an interesting second thing we can do. Of 
course you should role reverse. How dare you refuse to try? How old are you?
        Admittedly, we have to pick the contexts we do this in, because as yet it is far 
from the general consensus or world-view in a culture that is in fact fixated on and 
colludes with adolescent (in not the best sense of the term) thinking.

        So I'm optimistic that there are a few things we can do, and start small, with our 
own circles of acquaintances and friends.

      Open for comments, revisions, suggestions.

           Warmly, Adam

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "CGayle" <>
To: <list at grouptalkweb.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: article Sociatry

>I want to respond to your point, ED.
> I do wonder if protest is a part of the process of change.  But it cannot be
> all the process of change.  I see it as ER (emergency) intervention.  But
> much social activism that I have been apart doesn't seem to go beyond that.
> Which is why I think the work you are doing, Ed, help in finding Moreno's
> keys of understanding of sociatry, is so crucial.
>
> Learning to role reverse and encounter is not a part of how the world works,
> or how most social activists operate.  EG, there is a leading activist rabbi
> who is always trying to confront a Jewish CEO of a lumber company about
> destroying trees with  Biblical teachings.  This is on top of years and
> years of physical protests by many at the venue.  Protesting and trying to
> shame the CEO into changing has not worked.  The activists aren't able to
> role reverse with the CEO of lumber industry, b/c they have demonized him so
> much AND most important, they cannot understand the CEO or corporation world
> view, b/c they see profit and business and how it's done as evil (and stop
> there).  What the CEO and company are doing is what has been the norm in
> business, and he would see no reason to do it differently.  This is the how
> the system works.  Trying to get the system to change by shaming, protesting
> and demonizing this CEO (or even confronting them with science of global
> warming)  is just not effective.  Getting a businessman to sit down and talk
> business, making it unprofitable, etc., might, b/c that would be part of his
> world view.  It's different worldviews, without enough information about
> each other's worlds to role reverse.
>
> I have learned much of this first hand, from trying to understand the world
> view of my father and his friends, who were in business and swallowed these
> view's whole....different planet....that most of us helper, touchy-feely,
> change the world types just don't begin to understand.  It's a trip, I'll
> tell ya!  But they are just people on the other side doing what they think
> they are supposed to be doing, stuck in their world view.
>
> The question is, what can psychodramatists offer to help with the bigger
> transformational process....the creating of the parallel universe...and I
> think it is a great deal.
> Cynthia
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: <edwschreiber at earthlink.net>
> To: <list at grouptalkweb.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 17, 2007 3:22 PM
> Subject: Re: article Sociatry
>
>
>> While I respect your perspect Cynthia, and I know from our
>> conversations that we have a quite similar vision of a world
>> of peace and sanity, I have difficulty with this statement:
>>
>> "Pinter's reaction is typical of social activism that
>> only knows protest and polarization to try to stop what is happening.  And
>> is a reaction typical of social activists who demonize one side over the
>> other, making one side seem the innocent victim, which also is not
> historically
>> or currently accurate. That is confronting the dynamics of the problem
> with the same dynamics; Bush
>> is demonizing, so demonize back."
>>
>> Here is my concern:  To suggest that the problem is the back and forth
> demonization of sides to another
>> does not recognize the soical implications of occupation, cultural
> destruction, invasion, and out and out
>> rape.  The impact of just the rediation experiments the United States is
> deploying in Iraq is equal, in
>> the long of it - the to gas chambers of the Nazi regime, in my view of
> things.  This is along side of
>> what we have done here to the First Nations of this land and what we are
> doing - with the rest of the world -
>> to the land, air, sea, fish, birds, plants, earth.
>>
>> I take this point of view:  unless we address the situation, it remains
> unaddressed.  How we address it is
>> critical.  We have the science in our hands.  Moreno left us with the
> science, albeit unfinished in the realization.
>> The whole idea of sociatry is so interesting to me.  What if he left us
> formulas to address the whole of mankind?
>>
>> That's my passion.
>>
>> Ed
>>
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>>
>>
>
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