re-visioning sociometry

[Ann Hale]

Adam, it was very sociometric and attending to the sociodynamic effect, when you moved toward persons attending your opening plenary address at the recent ASGPP meeting and asked them to share what they do with psychodrama.  You provided access for people to become more known, to identify something that greatly interested them, and invited connection at a moment in the conference when people were noticing the numbers and might have been wondering about whether or not they would ever get connected.  It corrected the notion that one person has the answers and opened consciousness to the collected picture of what is possible.  Thank you.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Adam Blatner 
  To: list at grouptalkweb.org 
  Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 8:45 AM
  Subject: re-visioning sociometry


  Dear Colleagues,
       Building off my thesis that we might re-vision psychodrama as a larger enterprise, that of multi-dimensional communication; it occurred to me after giving that talk that sociometry is also a term for several categories or a larger category that I'll call "Quantifying Subjectivity"--- alas, a bit of a mouthful, but what else?
            My points include: 1. that sociometry as actually practiced  (e.g., using the spectrogram, the local-gram, choice techniques in selecting protagonist, etc.) tends most often to address dynamics that do not strictly measure anything--- so much for the sociometry--- and often do not measure tele specifically or the patterns of rapport within a group. (It might be argued that tele is indirectly involved, but that's the point---trying to make the phenomena fit the theory.)
           2. Rather, they (a) offer ways for people to estimate their own position or degree of involvement in a given criterion and (b) make this explicit, thus giving themselves and the group they're in better feedback. (c) Based on that feedback, they can also re-assess their own position and the group leader or others can proceed to make other decisions. 
           3. The estimate of one's own position, degrees of caring, preferences, and so forth speak to themes that may be personal and impersonal rather than inter-personal. 
                   It might not be called "tele" (in a technical sense) but people do have gradations of preference for all sorts of non-personal objects, situations, experiences.
                   Also, animals (even one-celled animals) may be recognized as having preferences and behaving or reacting to them. Some are inter-active---i.e., sexual attraction and mating behaviors--- and some are just preferring this environment, (e.g., cooler, moister) over that environment (e.g., hotter, dryer)

          4. All sentient beings may be considered to have a kind of subjectivity, interiority. (Indeed, a number of contemporary philosophers would attribute this to all particles in existence!)    This experiencing quality, however simple, unconscious (i.e., non-reflective), nevertheless partakes of a capacity for some discrimination and preference. So there may be a continuum of preference, with interpersonal preferences and reciprocity being discerned as somewhat more complex phenomena in the higher and more social animals. 

          5. The value of sociometry, it seems to me, involves less the ideal of outsiders measuring telic dynamics (e.g., sociologists doing research)--- I question the actual value of the many academic papers written in the 1940s-1960s, and among sociologists, they seem to have largely dropped it so that it is rarely mentioned in textbooks since 1970---; but rather, it is most valuable in sensitizing people to attend to their own patterns of preference, and to consider those patterns and dynamics in groups. The word "sensitization" is appropriate because most folks over-ride, deny, ignore these experiences, at least consciously. Moreno was correct in noting that they have a good deal of influence on unconscious individual and social behavior. Indeed, I've come to the provisional conclusion that sociometry (in its broadest sense) constitutes a depth psychology no less profound than the other types---Freudian, Jungian, etc. (It's not a complete psychology, but it does address very significant and often unconscious dynmamics.)

          Well, that's the unfolding idea, and I thought I'd invite input.  
                                     
  Adam Blatner, M.D.
     website: www.blatner.com/adam/   


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  Grouptalk mailing list
  List at grouptalkweb.org
  http://grouptalkweb.org/mailman/listinfo/list_grouptalkweb.org



------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  No virus found in this incoming message.
  Checked by AVG. 
  Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 269.23.0/1381 - Release Date: 4/16/2008 9:34 AM
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://grouptalkweb.org/pipermail/list_grouptalkweb.org/attachments/20080417/477be7f5/attachment.html