Role Reversal, etc. (response to Peter H)

[Ivo Banaco]

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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>
>
> *Barnett J. Weiss, MA, LCSW* , *7410 Ridge Blvd 2D;Brooklyn, NY 11209 **Cell
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>
> *
>
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