jung and voice dialogue
Neil Hucker
eddy1 at labyrinth.net.au
Sun Apr 6 04:48:51 CDT 2008
Thanks A for your prompt responses.
Adam and Ivo,
I agree with you Adam that voice dialogue can be described as you have ably done in psychodrama terms. I find psychodrama so refreshing because mental processes can be displayed in action.
A book highlighting Active Imagination, INNER WORK, By Robert A Johnson (Harper San Fransisco).
I agree, my understanding with Active Imagination is that the person does not function as the psychodrama director with their own personified elements that emerge in the imagination with active imagination. Voice dialogue is like a concretization of it
Sorry about that Ivo I later realized that you were describing someone else's work.
I will have trouble translating Portuguese, in fact it will be impossible. I will wait for the translation or the meeting in Rome.
I also see psychodramna as the most wholistic (systemic) method of personal therapy around.
regards to you both
neil
neil
----- Original Message -----
From: Adam Blatner
To: Ivo Banaco ; eddy1 at labyrinth.net.au
Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2008 1:19 PM
Subject: jung and voice dialogue
Hi Ivo and Neil,
You can send this to grouptalk if you wish, or not... as you like
I met Hal in the 1960s, did some psychodrama workshops in Los Angeles and I think he attended. Then again in early 1970s when he was setting up his new institution, just before meeting Sidra and then starting Voice Dialogue. He was somewhat Jungian before that time, never orthodox, and continued to integrate other things. I occasionally correspond with Hal & Sidra.
Voice dialogue in my opinion is basically a simple psychodrama technique---have the different parts /roles dialogue, and a third party, the meta-role or client as co-director along with the therapist/psychodrama director in the mirror technique occasionally intervening to interview and draw forward either of the two roles or perhaps a third or fourth voice that is not very "loud."
The stones mix it with other approaches. Of course there's room for integrating this into ordinary therapy. I do something like it with my enacted dialogue with spiritual beings. http://www.blatner.com/adam/level2/enacteddialog.html
I'll even be doing some of this at a workshop at the forthcoming ASGPP conference next week---workshop mixing mandala drawing as a warm-up for axiodrama work.
Active imagination in my thinking is very close to either hypnodrama or just a strongly warmed-up person pursuing a dream-like drama, or finishing a dream the way one might want it done; or just going on a kind of guided imagination trip with the new elements emerging and being assigned roles.
There are other Jungian comments---a lively Jungian psychodrama community in North Italy with its own journal, a couple of books, a chapter in the new theory of psychodrama anthology from Routledge...
I hope this helps. Warmly, Adam
----- Original Message -----
From: Ivo Banaco
To: Neil Hucker
Cc: Adam Blatner
Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: Role Reversal, etc. (response to Peter H)
Hi Neil,
I hope in don't mind. I put Adam in Cc.
You said: I am interested in your use of the term Active Imagination. Are you using this term as it is described in Jungian psychotherapy.
Note that I am not using the term Active Imagination myself. I've put this "therapy vignette" as you called of someone whom I consider to be an important and relatively unknown psychologist of our time - Hal Stone, Phd. I know that at the time that this story happened, Hal Stone was one of leading figures of Jungian Psychotherapy, before he left this particularly orientation. Eventually, he and his wife Sidra Stone created a therapeutic technique that changed their personal and, latter, professional life – their system is known by the name of Voice Dialogue (they recently admitted that their worked have developed in a way that the name Hal and Sidra would prefer now would be "Psychology of the Aware Ego").
I cannot hide the fact that I am profoundly amazed with their technique which has amazing points of contact with psychodrama (but we cannot reduce one to another) that one could asked how come they do not approximate more closely at least, as I am not aware of any strong connection between the two. I feel that psychodrama would be much richer if a significant number of psychodramatists embraced Voice Dialogue (VD). The other way around it's not possible because it is not the goal of VD creators to build any theory or meta-theory around the therapeutic system. Their vision was always from the beginning to build a good technique that any psychological school of thought could embrace in its practices. As I see the technique, I would make this strong statement: Only Psychodramatic School could embrace with full heart and meaning the VD system.
One possible starting point: Adam Blatner met personally Hal Stone (back in the sixties right Adam?)…I don't know if they keep in touch nowadays…if don't…it's about start…J
Neil: I came across this term and practice when referencing my writing on my work with Imaginary Psychodrama. I have returned to explore it in more depth. I am also interested to know whether there was any communication between Moreno and Jung and whether there was any cross fertilization between them.
I know that there is out there some sort of Jungian psychodrama methods and I've recently discover a Brazilian book called "Jung and Moreno approximations" – in Portuguese - Aproximações entre Jung e Moreno by an experienced psychodramatist Cybele Ramalho (I haven't read it yet).
All the best,
Ivo
On 4/2/08, Neil Hucker <eddy1 at labyrinth.net.au> wrote:
Dear Ivo, I enjoyed entering into the therapy vignette you shared.
I am always intrigued when my doubling of a patient for schizophrenia does not match the psychotic diagnosis in the referral. I have a clear memory of a patient diagnosed as having shizophrenia who had to await my courage to challenge the conserve diagnosis and apply my knowledge of Borderline PD and eventually, DID for their healing journey to be helped more adequately.
I am interested in your use of the term Acttive Imagination. Are you using this term as it is described in Jugian psychotherapy.
I came across this term and practice when referencing my writing on my work with Imaginary Psychodrama. I have returned to explore it in more depth. I am also interested to know whether there was any communication between Moreno and Jung and whether there was any cross fertilization between them.
neil
----- Original Message -----
From: Ivo Banaco
To: BARNETT WEISS
Cc: list at grouptalkweb.org
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2008 4:10 AM
Subject: Re: Role Reversal, etc. (response to Peter H)
I totally agree with Adam in a separate reply from this sequence of e-mails (I will add something in other mail). I also respect Peter and Bud and the important messages they are sending. In this regard, I recently read an article by Hal Stone, Phd, that reports this meaningful story about one patience:
"Jimmie was eleven years of age when his parents first came to me and they
were very upset. They had just received a letter from the school informing
them that they had done a complete psychological evaluation on the boy
because of his disturbed behavior, that he was being diagnosed as
schizophrenic and that they were strongly recommending he be placed in a
special setting run by a psychoanalytic group in the area. Since they felt
that he was schizophrenic they felt that he needed a special facility for this
level of mental impairment.
They were very upset by this letter and their question was whether I could help them in this situation
would do an independent evaluation. I would need all of the medical records
that were available before I saw him. I couldn't promise them more than
that.
Two to three weeks later Jimmie walked into my office. He was a very
curious child, interested in everything he saw. On my desk I had a pile of
psychological and psychiatric reports four or five inches high containing
notes, test materials and psychiatric evaluations. All of them concurred in
the diagnosis of schizophrenia. They described how what had begun as
acting out behavior had, over the past year, developed into an increasingly
disturbed state. As I sat with Jimmie I was experiencing a huge conflict
because my experience of him was very different. It was very positive. I
liked him very much and I thought he had a wonderful spirit. On the other
hand, I had these reports from a very fine school and very qualified health
care practitioners all making the same diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Jimmie was easy to talk to and he told me about his school and about its
philosophy. Basically, their management style was to never let children be
alone but to always keep them busy doing things. It was felt that being
alone allowed them to collapse into their own imagination and fantasy and
that this would be damaging to them. It was becoming clear to me that
Jimmie was a very imaginative youngster and that the school routine might
not have been the best kind of experience for him.
In the course of our discussion I asked Jimmie if he ever remembered any
dreams. He told me that he had one just last evening. This was the dream:
"I am sitting in a wheelchair in the lobby of my school. My parents are
visiting me before they go back to California. I am crying and begging them
not to go. They feel they have no choice however and they get up to leave
and I wake up sobbing that they are leaving me here."
The dream was totally stunning to me. He was in a wheel chair. Why was he
there? Did this mean that he was indeed crippled in the way the reports on
him indicated was the case? Why else would he be in the wheel chair? Yet
every instinct in me felt a core of health in him that was incompatible with
the diagnosis.
I asked him to close his eyes and go back into the dream and be in the wheel
chair. He did this easily, just as I expected, and after a half-minute or so I
asked him why he was in the wheel chair. What was wrong with him? Could
he tell me anything about how he felt sitting there?
Jimmie then said a remarkable thing to me. "What I feel is that there is a
magnet in the back of the wheel chair and that this magnet is holding me in
the chair." I said before that I was stunned when I heard his dream.
Hearing his response to my questioning was being stunned to tenth power.
Suddenly it was all so simple. Everything made sense and the excitement I
had been feeling began to lessen and I really felt very happy with things.
I realized then that Jimmie was a highly creative, highly gifted, highly
imaginative child who had been misplaced in this school. I'm sure the theory
worked for many of their children, but for a youngster like this one it was
totally counter-productive. He was a magical child and the world of
imagination was essential to him. It had literally driven him into
schizophrenic behavior because he had nowhere else to go. It was an
artificially induced state and this I felt could be changed.
I then said to him that if he was being held in the chair by this magnet it
seemed to me that he could do something to break the power of the magnet.
We did this together. First he broke the power in his imagination and then
he actually got up from his chair in my office (as though it were the
wheelchair) and walked around the room. All of this was done using simple
methods of active imagination. After five or ten minutes we then went into
my art studio where he began to work with sand play and painting. I saw him
for about 12 sessions. He was now ready to stop our work together and he
began public school near his home in Southern California. I saw him for two
sessions when he was in High School and he just wanted to talk over some of
the issues he was dealing with in high school. Through other sources I can
tell you that Jimmie ultimately went into the film business where he has led
a successful professional life."
So I think we can happily agree in these points.
That being said, I think that in what concerns developmental theory this particular focus in honoring the child is, in my opinion, beside the point, and could be misleading. I will keep my own points for another post...
Ivo
On 3/29/08, BARNETT WEISS <budweiss at verizon.net> wrote:
I couldn't agree more. Glen Doman of www.iahp.org THe Insititute for the Achievement of Human Potential has been coaching parents for years so that they do not DUMB THEIR CHILDREN DOWN. The result is parents who follow his program end up with total geniuses by and large self motivated to learn in divergent directions coming from their interests. Also see John Gatto's work Dumbing Us Down as well as his Underground History of American Education which details the roots of this dumbing us down process which is working to the benefit of those in power. Gatto is one of the most amazing teachers ever. He was the New York State teacher of the year in 1992 having for years taken the most difficult middle or intermeidate public school troubled near dropouts and turning them into some of the most accomplished self motivated students in the New York Schools anywhere in a year or so.
All children other than those with serious brain damage or serious retardation are born geniuses and I'm not so sure that these latter ones are not as well, it's just harder to get it with them. Instead of teaching children, we need to learn to assist them as they go about mastering everything in their environment and expose them to more as they go along. Sociometry in the classroom and elsewhere would go a long way toward assisting their Genius coming out in social engineering for the benefit of all.
Howard Glasser's work in Transforming the difficult child through the nurtured heart approach has shown that the geniuses we have unwittingly made into monsters through our compulsory schooling and TEACHING STUFF can be saved by basically noticing what they are doing that is good and calming ourselves down when they act out. This is similar to the work of DeShazer ( deceased unfortunately) and Inzoo Kim Berg in Milwaukee who put together SOLUTION FOCUSSED THERAPY which is still one of the most effective approaches for shifting children and adults out of their blocked paths and back onto the road of productive satisfying lives.
Ah well, there's the rub. Too many good things happening all at once. That's why we need Fred Newman to balance things out. LOL. Blessings, all, Bud
Peter Howie <peterhowie at macquariehouse.com.au> wrote:
Dear Ivo,
First up I am not a Wilber fan or anti-fan. But I wanted to put a small counter to his idea of the 3 major development levels from a Morenian perspective. Maybe not a Morenian perspective but a Morenian expression at least. Moreno suggested in one of his books on Sociometry that - something like - " the child is not interested in self-realisation - the child is interested in world realisation"... and it is us that stop at self-realisation. I think also implied is that the child with all their capacity for spontaneity and creativity is pegged back to only self-realisation. This I guess has more to do with the interests of the child - while what you are bringing up is the capacities of the child - but interesting nonetheless.
Cheers
Peter Howie
www.morenocollegium.com.au
At 07:54 PM 3/28/2008 +0000, Ivo Banaco wrote:
We can add in this conversation some useful theoretical inputs by some important points made by the field of developmental psychology. American philosopher, Ken Wilber, makes an important synthesis of some of the most important discoveries in this regard. To put in simple, every human being develops through 3 major levels of development that goes from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric (eventually kosmocentric in the higher realm). There are many scales that we can discuss, but the normal movement is from the narrow circles of egocentricity to the wider embrace of the world and its perspectives.
Things get more complicated (but more intuitive) when Ken Wilber adds to this levels of being, lines of development. The most important works in this field comes from Howard Gardner with his frames of mind and multiple intelligences. The general message is: Some people can be better in some areas, other people in others.
Ken Wilber's theory is more complex than that as some of you might know, so I will not develop more than that.
Having said that, let me just explore an important intersection about levels&lines and this conversation about Moreno's Developmental Theory. Ken Wilber in most recent works develops an important meta-theory framework. Specifically in the interior/subjective dimensions of human beings (what he calls the Upper left quadrant and Lower left quadrant, being the exterior/objective dimensions the upper right and lower right quadrants, completing the four quadrants of reality, upper quadrants the individual dimensions, lower quadrants the collective dimensions), Wilber distinguishes the view from within and the view from without. Let's call them zone 1 and zone 2 approaches, respectively.
A zone #1 approach privileges an understanding of the subjective and intersubjective dimensions of our beings from within, using the first and second person languages, using meaning, intersubjective mutual understanding, hermeneutics, phenomenology, etc. A zone #2 approach is mainly a structuralist stance, an "it" language, a theory. Ideally, these two perspectives must be co-creating an integral view of subjective dimensions. A failure to do so could have serious negative implications. For instance, Freud could had had a pretty good theory about the unconscious, neurosis, etc, but it lacks a good therapeutic method in order to bring solutions to the patients. He was good at it language, not so good in zone #1 approaches.
In this discussion, we should have in mind that what is being discussed is mainly a view from within, which is great as far as it goes. Concepts as role reversing, mirroring, empathy development, must intertwine with modern research of human development in its multiple intelligences.
"Experience without theory is blind,
but theory without experience is mere intellectual play"
- Immanuel Kant
I think the above simplifies my issue.
All the best,
From Portugal,
Ivo Banaco
On 3/28/08, Peter Howie <peterhowie at macquariehouse.com.au> wrote:
Hi Adam,
Good responses! but lunch and a meeting call.
PH The other aspect of this model is noticing when a client or trainee is, during their work, in one or other of these stages. For instance confidence fading, energy going down can often indicate the stage of a double and hence doubling is valuable. The stage may only last a moment but it could indicate some form of doubling rather than mirroring or role reversal (which includes mirroring)
AB: I think you're saying that doubling is often useful when the protagonist is "losing energy" -- is that so?
No I am suggesting that the protagonist is actually acting as though they are in the stage of the double - that in the role they are in they are incapable of the things a person who has gone through the stage of the double are capable of - in that role. Its not there in role reversal or taking up other roles. But really a person may have matured past the stage for all practical purposes but when enacting a drama they may be in that stage again.
Cheers
Peter
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