Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity

The Roots of Change in Dramatherapy

Salvo Pitruzzella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317392996
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity presents a new theoretical approach to dramatherapy. The book examines the key concepts of creativity and intersubjectivity in detail, through a comparison of their manifestations in children's life and the major scientific studies and developing research in the fields.

Linking these concepts, Salvo Pitruzzella argues that 'identity' as a construct is now outmoded, and needs to be replaced with a more relational model. His ideas impact on dramatherapy theory, updating its basic tenets, and providing insight into how it practically works, with a focus on imagination as a major tool to support change.

Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity will appeal to dramatherapists in training and practice, as well as other professionals in the field of arts therapies, plus those with a general interest in Creative Arts Therapies.

1 IDENTITY AND OTHERNESS

DOI: 10.4324/9781315679044-1

Identity traps

At the turn of the twentieth century, Luigi Pirandello escaped from his rocky and archaic Sicily, and from the career of sulphur trader which had been prepared for him. He lived in Rome trying to eke out a living as a writer. In 1904, after a few fruitless attempts, he finally achieved some success with the novel The Late Mattia Pascal, which would eventually become one of the literary classics of its time. It is the story of a man who feels entrapped in a life he did not choose and cannot love; hence he tries to devise a different one for himself, in a quite peculiar way.

One day, while journeying toward Northern Italy, Mattia Pascal reads in a newspaper that in his village a man was found drowned in a canal, and that this man has been recognised as himself, even by his own wife. He is puzzled at first but then a subtle idea sneaks into his mind: this is the chance he had always hoped for. So he decides to let them believe that he is dead and to provide himself with a different identity: no more the dull and prematurely aged Mattia Pascal, he is the brand new Adriano Meis, still young and handsome and rich enough to take on the new adventure. He disowns his past, in favour of a future full of promise. However, it is soon clear that the promise cannot be fulfilled, and the brilliant new life turns into a nightmare. Although the new identity is much better than the old one, it is not real enough to let him live it fully. He must be on guard all the time, to avoid contradictions and to keep his identity safe. Furthermore, some areas of life are indeed forbidden to him: he cannot marry the woman he fell in love with because he has no papers, and for the same reason he cannot even buy himself a puppy for company. Eventually, under the threat of a duel, he finally collapses: he simulates the suicide of Adriano Meis and takes a train home. But there is no more room for him at home. His spaces have been taken up by other people, and even his role as a husband had been taken by another man. He will spend the rest of his life in solitude, in his dim and shelved identity, remembering his different lives, and going from time to time to the cemetery to visit his own grave: ‘Occasionally, a curious passer-by follows me for a while at a distance, then walks back with me and smiles, considering my situation, when he asks: “Who are you, after all?” I shrug, shut my eyes for a moment, and answer: “Ah, my dear friend … I am the late Mattia Pascal”’ (Pirandello, 1904: 578).

It is noteworthy that the hardest challenges that the author inflicts on the protagonist are not tied so much with interior torments, but rather with legal problems (having no papers), to the point that we may imagine that if Mattia Pascal had met a crafty paper forger, he probably would have continued living his new identity undisturbed, letting the old one slowly fade into the fogs of oblivion.

The necessity to identify each single person, distinguishing one from another, appears pivotal for our society; this is evident in the fact that every individual is obliged to demonstrate before the law that he/she is that specific person and not a different one. We are so used to the idea that it seems obvious and we cannot look at it but as a sign of civilisation. The history of ID cards, however, is not as old as it appears. For millennia individuals have been identified through their physical features, or through their web of relationships: familiar bonds, jobs and social roles, belonging to societies, guilds, and groupings of various kinds. In the Middle Ages, according to the historian Valentin Groebner (2008), the use of emblems, showing rank, lineage, corporation and similar features gradually became common in Europe. Then with the growth of trading and communications some kind of personal documents were introduced: safe-conducts and passports for some categories of people, like messengers, pilgrims, merchants, and even beggars (for them, it was also a sort of licence, making them distinguishable from unauthorised ones).

However, it was in the sixteenth century that the idea of a universal identity document started spreading around. The first examples were in Spain, where the names of people asking to immigrate to the New World were thoroughly recorded, officially to prevent there being fugitives among them trying to escape the law. They were written in big books, at the Casa de Contrataciòn in Seville, which provided people with a certificate of identity (Groebner, 2008: 189). Being the empire where the sun never sets, Spain established the link between being and being recorded and started tying people's identity to the portable copy of the written official record which identifies us and allows us to be identified: the ID card.

Naturally, it was just a matter of checking how many human livestock belonged to the king and nothing like suggesting that individuals could have rights. We would have to wait until the bourgeois revolutions of the end of the eighteenth century to hear the statement that a person deserves respect in itself. We could say that in the Modern Age the spreading of ID cards, which after all are a control instrument, went along with the growing awareness of the uniqueness of each individual, and the necessity of being recognised.

As usual, Pirandello is a bitter prophet. On the one hand, he anticipates the ‘identity obsession’ of the twentieth century, that is the continuous urge to define who we are, and on the other hand, he points his finger at the precariousness of identity itself and, after all, its deceptiveness.

During the twentieth century, not only had the issue of identity become an object of study for countless scientists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, but it has also gradually grown as a basic concept of folk psychology and of the media discourse. At the same time, the social control of individuals has been increasing, both in pressure and in extensiveness. Paradoxically, the industry of identity forging has never been as widespread as in the last century: as we said about the vicissitudes of poor Mattia Pascal, a crafty forger may change your life. And during the Cold War, the character of the spy (the secret agent) was deified by the media, with innumerable novels and movies.

And how fascinating fake identities are! Watching Martin Scorsese's film The Departed, we breathlessly wait to discover who will be unmasked first: the policeman pretending to be a gangster, or the gangster pretending to be a policeman. From another point of view, Billy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is really a gangster: he is affiliated with the gang by passing the due initiation trials; he acts as a true gangster. It is the same for Colin (Matt Damon), who really took a solemn oath, and wears an authentic badge.

It brings to mind the fate of the Christians who converted to Islam during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, often because they changed their faith after being abducted by the pirates who overran the Mediterranean Sea, but also sometimes voluntarily, as they envisaged in the Islamic world the possibility of improved social standing which was denied to them in their home countries. The historian Lucetta Scaraffia, in her 1993 book Rinnegati (Renegades), tells us that in two centuries, they were hundreds of thousands and suggests that this is a key occurrence to consider while reflecting on the Western concept of identity. Sometimes they were just sold as slaves, but often they were released if they were willing to abandon their original religion and convert to Islam. The conversion allowed them to be accepted in Arabian society and some of them had good careers. Scaraffia points to an interesting difference in the two religions about conversion. For the Muslims, what is most important is that the newcomer respects the traditional prescribed behaviours, ranging from circumcision to ritual ablutions; from food restrictions (like the prohibition on eating pork) to the canonical prayers. The records of the Inquisition, judging those who had become Islamic and wanted to come back to Christianity, show a different approach. They were barely interested in the fact that the renegade had respected the precepts of the adverse religion, but whether the choice to convert was made ‘with the heart’ or not. They were judged by the analysis not of the actual behaviour, but of the real intentions, that is, how much they maintained their Christian faith, although concealing it under a formal acceptation of Islam: ‘they present themselves in front of the Sacred Court saying, almost all of them, that they did it only extrinsically, keeping intrinsically the catholic creed’ (Scaraffia, 1993: 104).¹ The possibility of maintaining a double identity, whilst one of them must be considered fictitious, is accepted: a sort of theatre play, but involving life and death. Scaraffia suggests that this phenomenon envisages some features of what will be the identity crisis of the Modern Age, that is in the words of Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘the fragmentation in a multitude of elements, whose synthesis poses a problem, in different terms for each culture’ (Lévi-Strauss, 2003: 17).

Back to Scorsese's film, we can notice that both the characters may have a prompt answer to the crucial question asked to Mattia Pascal at the end of the book: ‘Who are you, after all?’ Actually, at least two (either ‘I am a gangster’ or ‘I am a policeman’), according to the context where the question is uttered.

It is undoubtedly a more anguishing question that everyone asks himself, ‘Who am I?’ These two questions establish identity. ‘Who are you?’ refers to the social domain; ‘Who am I?’ to the personal one. Of course, the two answers can coincide: the description of myself that I am telling to myself can appear more or less matching the one I tell other people. Usually, they are in disagreement, in a continuous dance of attraction and repulsion. ‘Who are you?’ requires an operational answer; ‘Who am I?’ urges self-reflection.

I can answer ‘Who are you?’ by displaying a fictitious identity; the answer to ‘Who am I?’ cannot be conceived but as an incessant quest. Who am I? This body I always carry with me, or the stories I tell? My masks or my secrets? What I think I am, or what the others think I am? Or what I think the others think I am? In addition: admitting that all these things can coexist and define a unity, I should ask myself another question: what made me as I am? My joys or my sorrows? My qualities or my shortcomings? My successes or my failures? And who commands on all this? My brain or my soul? My biological matrix or my experiences? My unconscious or my consciousness? The fact that all this can be called ‘mine’ does not mean either that it can be considered as stable, or that a synthesis is necessarily possible. None of all this is immune to change; furthermore: where is the unifying factor?

The fact is that in the adventure of the Late Modern Age, identity has been entrapped in a vicious circle. The more we feel we need it, the more it becomes elusive; the more it becomes elusive, the more the need grows, to the point of pushing us to contrive fictitious identities.

Now, let us move for a while from the individual to the social level. Looking around us, we cannot but agree with the Italian anthropologist Francesco Remotti (1996, 2010), when he says that ‘identity’ has become a ‘poisonous word’. When identity is constructed through exclusion, when we use our identity – as a group, nation or species – like a trench facing otherness, we embrace what the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has called a ‘solitarian approach’ (Sen, 2006): in order to reassure ourselves we separate from those we think are different from us. In doing so, an element of violence worms its way into our relationships with others: in history we have seen it many times in old scapegoats and modern mobbing, moving on to pogroms and lynching. Because when we constitute ourselves as ‘we’, it is necessary to have ‘the others’, who cannot manifest themselves but as rivals or even as enemies. Identity, whether being of group, nation or race, needs clear and solid borders which can turn into walls, separating us from the ‘barbarians’. To be plausible, identity must be impenetrable from the influences of the ‘others’ as they are felt as contaminations.

We can look at the ‘others’ either as peers, or as inferiors. But even when we consider them at our same level, we cannot avoid demanding that they conform to our values, our customs, and our way of thinking. Tzvetan Todorov, in his study on the conquest of America, finds traces of this attitude in Cristoforo Colombo's writings:

He thinks of the Indians (never actually using this term) either as complete human beings, with the same rights as himself; in this case, he does not see them as equals, but as identical, and this kind of behaviour ends up in assimilationism, the projection of one's values upon the others. Or he starts with difference, but this is immediately translated in terms of superiority (in his case, obviously, the Indians are considered inferiors): the existence of a human substance, which is really other, and not only a lower, and imperfect, degree of what we are, is denied.

(Todorov, 1984: 55)

In both cases, we find the tendency to erect a rather static and concrete ‘we’, which justified in the following four centuries a forced acculturation or massacres and plundering of the Native Americans. And even now, every day we listen to stories of violence towards the ‘others’, those who are not like us for culture, race, religion or any other source of identity (even the most trivial, like football).

But Remotti warns that identities are not natural and necessary entities:

In social contexts, subjects neither have, nor can have, a natural consistency, they are not realities in themselves, autonomous and independent from the context. Their existence is profoundly social, and depends on the ‘recognition’ they are able to obtain.

(Remotti, 2010: 33)

The anthropologist hints at a controversial aspect of the commonsense notion of identity: the paradoxical truth that each identity needs an ‘otherness’ in order to validate itself.

To say identity means inevitably to oppose and separate identity and otherness; to say ‘we’ means, most of the time, ‘we/others’, suggesting a deeply entangled relationship of involvement and complementarity. The frailty and transience of the borders point out that otherness is within the ‘we’; only when the ‘we’ appeals to identity, otherness is chased out in an often violent and arbitrary way.

(Ibid.: 14)

Remotti maintains that at the core of the ‘we’ (as at the core of the ‘I’) there is a request for recognition: of needs, characteristics, prerogatives, roles, rights, values, projects, objectives, and even of our very existence, but not necessarily of identity. In fact, ‘identity’ and ‘otherness’ are not two separate circles, but the ideal extreme poles of a continuum (a ‘band of possibilities’), within which every subject, both individual and collective, puts itself, with continuous fluctuations.

I [|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||] O

The values of coherence, stability, and unity are collocated toward the extreme I; while the values of openness, communication, exchange and transformation, therefore of creativity and innovation, toward the extreme O.

(Ibid.: XXIII)

He also advises that, although the very extreme conditions are basically unreachable, it can be very dangerous even just getting too near to one or the other. The shutting down of identity deprives us of any possibility of entertaining a fertile dialogue with the others, and this can degenerate into hyper-defence which breeds violence. The complete shifting towards the others may generate great anxiety due to lost boundaries, which humans cannot tolerate too much of.

If we keep this argument in mind going back to the plan of personal identity, we will see how although continually invoked, it reveals itself as being delusory.

Vicissitudes of the cogito

With traces and suggestions, we have glimpsed at the beginning of the Modern Age the first meaningful signs of what will be the identity issue to come in the following centuries. The spreading of the documents of personal identification sanctioned the principle of the acknowledgement from an authority as foundational of individual identity. Each person is one person: as a rule, you cannot change yourself with another, and you cannot be mistaken as another. Experience, of course, is far more elastic than the principles, as is shown by the constant presence of forging. Howe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Identity and otherness
• 2 Beyond identity: the intersubjective matrix
• 3 Creativity and person-making
• 4 Re-visioning the dramatic paradigm
• 5 A dramatic model of personhood
• 6 Imagination and mirroring in dramatherapy
• 7 Conclusions: steps to a new conceptual framework for dramatherapy
• Bibliography
• ndex