Dramatherapy

Theory and Practice 1

Sue Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317858553
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dramatherapy: Theory and Practice 1 introduces the reader to the basic issues of dramatherapy and offers a highly authoritative guide to the clinical practitioner or teacher who wishes to use role-play and enactment in the context of therapeutic work. With its companion volume Dramatherapy: Theory and Practice 2, it provides an invaluable resource for all those whose work can benefit from the use of dramatherapy including counsellors, nurses and occupational therapists.

1
Dramatherapy and Groups

Sue Jennings

Can this cockpit hold
The vasty field of France? Or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did afright the air at Agincourt?

Chorus Henry V

Dramatherapy is a group process which explores, at many levels of metaphor, dramatic engagement between members of a group.

Before exploring the nature of dramatherapy groups and the nature of other groups which may have dramatic elements or activities, I want to consider the relationship between dramatherapy groups and other groupwork models. This relationship has not always been an easy one. There has often been a simplistic division between 'sit down and be quiet, you're acting out' or 'don't just sit there do something!' Dramatherapy groups are often considered 'fringe' activities in a theatre of medicine and dramatherapists are given marginal status. It is first necessary to consider the emergence of both groupwork and dramatherapy during the middle period of this century. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I shall look at the influences in therapy that contributed to the groupwork movement as well as the influences in drama that contributed to dramatherapy.

As human beings we find ourselves in groups for a variety of reasons. We are all born into groups — the first-born has the sometimes unenviable task of turning a couple into a group. We come together throughout our lives in a variety of groups of varying sizes. As small children we often join a structured playgroup, and then have free play with the neighbours' children. Structured forms of group games and group activities of all sorts take place in schools, clubs and societies. However, it is only the more enlightened of teachers who will actually teach through the group: usually we teach to the group, or even at the group, rather than through it. Most self-directed learning experiments are usually with individuals rather than groups. Group projects are a more recent innovation in the classroom. Very early in life we instil the individual concept — 'Are you sure its your own work?' Yet pupils themselves often struggle on their own initiatve with group learning and understanding. This can reach difficult dimensions in teenhood, when the pull of the peer group can be strong enough to set up an opposition between the known authority of the parents and the fusion with the group identity. Or it can be that the parent/child identity is fused and will not allow for separation into peer-group identity. Many parents themselves are very ambivalent about the amount of separation they want from their children, and vary in their attitudes between boys and girls. Children who choose to read in their rooms are often hassled into 'get out and enjoy yourself'.

It would seem that throughout life there is a struggle concerning the individual and the group — about being alone and being together. However a closer look at ancient philosophy would show that societies have always struggled with the 'individual and the group' at both personal levels as well as societal levels. Although the study of groups of people by sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists has increased as these disciplines have grown, the notion of the group as a form of systematic treatment and change did not occur until relatively recently. First there had to be a shift from the treatment of the soma to the treatment of the psyche.

The turn of this century certainly saw the emergence of major new thinking in terms of treating neurosis and later, psychosis. The old asylums usually locked people up and, when necessary, manacled them for restraint. People who felt 'unwell' were given support or medicines of various sorts. People were put into mental hospitals for all sorts of reasons (for example, women for illegitimacy). There was still much folk medicine, with rural midwives and exorcism from the clergy. Brown and Pedder (1979) give a brief description of the historic background of dynamic psychotherapy and Foucault (1973) illustrates the wider medical context of the time. Many writers and philosophers knew of unconscious feelings but it was Freud in 1894 who crystallised this thinking and wrote extensively on the nature of the unconscious. This later formed the basis of psychoanalysis. Now we refer to psychodynamic psychotherapy, whether for individuals or groups, in contrast to task-centred therapy.

With Freud, Jung and others, the practice of treating patients in a one-to-one setting developed extensively and there was a whole wave of energy in psychoanalytic practice, research and writing. However, there was already to be a reaction not only against the one-to-one treatment, but also that it was static and verbal. Jacob Moreno, born in Vienna in 1892, became frustrated with this noninteractive model of therapy and began to develop his own ideas growing from his studies in sociometry — the study of the 'social atom* of which people are a part. He soon developed the theory and practice of psychodrama and later sociodrama. Moreno could be said to be the forerunner of modern group psychotherapy, although his ideas of using action in groups rather than only words took much longer to be accepted.

I do not want to elaborate here on psychodramatic theory, which is developed in more detail by Davies in Chapter 5, nor will I repeat information described by other writers in the context of different approaches to working with groups (e.g. Shuttleworth on Family Therapy in Chapter 6). However, just as all psychodynamic psychotherapy must acknowledge the major contribution of Freud, so most groupwork approaches acknowledge the innovatory influence of Moreno on their thinking and practice.

During recent years there has been a plethora of innovations in the development of different approaches to groupwork. For the moment I want to focus on the emergence of the small group (which later influenced the emergence of De Mare's large-group concept, see De Mare, 1975) as a focus for treatment and change.

What has since come to be known as the Northfield Experiments, which took place in the military hospital with Jones, Bion and others, not only had an impact on the eventual practice of the small group but also on other innovations. Two in particular need mention: social therapy (Clark, 1974) and the therapeutic communities (Jones, 1968). The development of therapy in small groups led to the establishment of some major centres for treatment and training, including the Tavistock Centre and later the Institute of Group Analysis. The impetus came from a small group of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts who included Bion, Foulkes, Anthonv and Main.

Brown and Pedder (1979) have suggested that the work can be contrasted in three ways: analysis in the group; analysis of the group; and analysis through the group. Analysis in the group was mainly operational in the USA and was the analysis of individuals in a group setting. Analysis of the group stems from the work of Bion and Ezriel with a particular emphasis on group dynamics. The term 'group dynamics' was first coined by Kurt Lewin in his involvement in the T-Group movement. Bion and Ezriel based their work at the Tavistock Centre and they not only worked with therapeutic groups but also with other sorts of institutions (Bion, 1961, Brown and Pedder, 1979). Therapy through the group is associated with the work of Foulkes who founded the Institute of Group Analysis. In group-analytic psychotherapy the individual is being treated in the context of the group (Foulkes and Anthony, 1973). Brown and Pedder suggest that Foulkes in fact anticipated recent understanding in family processes and therapy when he 'came to see the individual as at a nodal point in a network of relationships and illness as a disturbance in the network that comes to light through the vulnerable individual'. Foulkes maintained that groups function, often simultaneously, at several different levels. According to De Mare and Kreeger (1974) the group analysis of Foulkes is the most influential in Britain today; certainly it has a major European and international following.

In addition to the three forms of group psychotherapy and psychodrama mentioned above, there are other group methods including gestait, encounter, T-groups and transactional analysis.

Group methods are now being used extensively in both the community and institutional setting. Not all groups are psychodynamic; there are many groups concerned with behaviour modification as well as activity groups of all kinds. Task-centred life and social groups have increased, especially recently with the work of Ellis and Whittington (1981) and others. Art therapy, music therapy, dance therapy as well as dramatherapy are all increasingly used. They are based on several theoretical models of practice.

In terms of workers we now have group analysts, group therapists, and group workers and psychodramatists. A useful description of verbal groupwork and action methods by Shaffer and Galinsky (1974) also describes the training for several of the methods. Before we start to look at the relationship of dramatherapy to other groupwork, I want to look at the recent developments of drama itself.

Just as people have always participated in groups, they have likewise always been engaged in drama to a greater or lesser extent. As far back as we can go in recorded history — and even earlier to the cave paintings in France which depict masked dancers — we know that people participated in some kind of dramatic ritual. Dramatic ritual has always enabled people to celebrate, heal, worship, to influence events, and to mediate between gods and mortals. Ritual drama has, until comparatively recently, had a central place in the affairs of people, it was belief, healing and worship in an integrated form. Drama has a unifying quality whereby the norms and values of the society are expressed within a context of heightened awareness and sensory experience, Turner (1969). Contrasting forms of dramatic expression in theatre have a more recent past but still can trace a history of 25,000 years from the classical theatre of ancient Greece. Thus we can see that dramatic expression has always played some part in the way we interact in groups with tremendous variation between cultures and continents.

For the present purpose I want to consider the influences in drama and theatre during the same period of time as Freud and the early group psychotherapists.

Just as Freud revolutionised the notion of 'treatment', extending it from static bodies that had things done to them to the possibility that there might be a psychic causality for the symptoms, and Moreno had set 'movement' in motion in psychodrama — Constants Stanislavski was more responsible than anyone else for freeing the stylised and postured theatre of the times. When Stanislavski took over the Moscow Arts Theatre he developed a new approach to the training of actors as well as to the style of theatre production. He was the first person to develop the 'as if' concept. With his actors he worked primarily on their emotional memory in order to bring authentic feelings to their parts. If an actor had difficulty with certain parts, then the 'as if' principle would enable them to get in touch with appropriate feelings. Stanislavski (1937) emphasised lengthy, intensive training for actors, the importance of the unconscious and the reality of the actors' own lives. The work of Artaud, too, though revolutionary in its own right nevertheless has roots in the work of Stanislavski, as have most theatre innovations of the past eighty years.

Grotowski in the 1970s became more and more concerned with the creativity of ordinary people his 'para-theatrical' work. His concern is to remove the separation between actors and audience, remove the box office and to find new ways of rediscovering an experience of drama and ritual. Grotowski (1968) terms it 'A Theatre of Sources — bringing us back to the sources of life, to direct primeval experience, to organic primary experience.'

Roose Evans (1984) commenting on this says that:

an attempt to create a genuine encounter between individuals who meet at first as complete strangers and then, gradually, as they lose their fear and distrust of each other, move towards a more fundamental encounter in which they themselves are the active and creative participants in their own drama of rituals and ceremonials.

With the influence of Stanislavski, there are numerous theatre directors who made an impact and developed new forms during this century; they are concerned in their research not with formulations but with a continuous journey. Sometimes this journey takes an actual form such as Peter Brook's journey to Africa to the Ik tribe and Grotowski's journey to the Far East. There is a kind of restlessness which needs to go on discovering and resists formulation and static theory. Peter Brook in his book The Empty Space (1972) talks about the need to revitalise the theatre, to make it Immediate (as contrasted with other forms — Dead Theatre, the Rough Theatre and Holy Theatre). He says that we should consider the French word for performance 'representation' in order to reconcile the contradiction of repetition necessary in rehearsal. It is an occasion when something is 're-presented' and therefore not an imitation of a description of a past event

It abolishes that difference between yesterday and today. It takes yesterday's action and makes it live again in every one of its aspects — including its immediacy. In other words a representation is what it claims to be — a making present. We can see how this is the renewal of life that repetition denies and it applies as much in rehearsal as it does in performance.

Recent innovators in the theatre have struggled to rediscover the active interaction between actor and audience, the 'genuine encounter'. However this encounter is not necessarily a fusion of the psyche of performer and observer, it may be by alienation — by a distancing such as described by Brecht in his work in Germany and America. Brecht never wanted the audience to forget they were in the theatre, that they were seeing a performance of events by actors and he would use various unexpected devices to rem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface to the Revised Edition
• Preface to the First Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Dramatherapy and Groups
• 2. Playing on Many Stages: Dramatherapy and the Individual
• 3. Dramatherapy and Play
• 4. Dramatherapy and Drama
• 5. Dramatherapy and Psychodrama
• 6. A Systems Approach to Dramatherapy
• 7. Dramatherapy and the Teacher
• 8. Dramatherapy with Disturbed Adolescents
• 9. Dramatherapy with People with a Mental Handicap
• 10. Dramatherapy in a Psychiatric Day Centre
• 11. Dramatherapy with Elderly People
• 12. Dramatherapy in In-patient Psychiatric Settings
• Appendix: Training Courses, Useful Addresses and Journals
• Index