Jung and Moreno

Essays on the theatre of human nature

Craig E. Stephenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415696449
• eBook ISBN: 9781135041526
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

To many, Jung and Moreno seem to be on opposite sides in their theories and their practices of psychotherapy. Jung defines self as emerging inwardly in an intrapsychic process of individuation; Moreno defines self as enacted outwardly in psychosocial networks of relationships. Jung and Moreno: Essays on the theatre of human nature shows how Jung and Moreno can be creatively combined to understand better and facilitate therapeutic work.

Craig E. Stephenson and contributors write about how and why they put together Jung and Moreno. They describe and discuss psychodrama sessions grounded in the fundamentals of Jung's analytical psychology, as well as dream and fairy tale enactments and individual psychoanalytical sessions in which they employ psychodramatic techniques. The essays retheorize Jungian concepts of transference and complexes in the light of Moreno's insights. They reframe and deepen traditional psychodramatic techniques by securing them within Jung's archetypal context.

Jung and Moreno challenges our understanding of healing practices and the integration of spontaneous unconscious processes, bringing these two ground breaking practitioners to meet collaboratively in the theatre of human nature. The contributions are original and insightful arguments by nine important thinkers. This book will be of interest to psychotherapists, analytical psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychodrama practitioners, drama therapists and students.

1

INTRODUCTION

Craig E. Stephenson

Whom do you see when you look at me?

Whom do you think you see when I look at you?

Who or what is it that you think cannot be seen by anyone – is it still you? …

Would you say that there are parts of yourself which have not lived yet?

What would bring forth the life of those parts?

‘Questions of Character’, from Joseph Chaikin, The Presence of the Actor, 1987, pp. 16–17

On 3 March 1907, at Bergstrasse No. 19 in Vienna, Freud and Jung famously met for the first time. The afternoon dinner conversation continued for thirteen hours, well into the night. How that exchange ended six years later with a curt typed postcard and subsequent silence is also common knowledge. Since then, it has taken Freudian and Jungian thinkers and practitioners almost a century to find effective ways to speak to each other about their differences within the larger circumference of their shared assumptions and values.

Perhaps less known is the only meeting of Freud and Moreno. It was in a lecture hall in Vienna, five years after his encounter with Jung. After delivering a lecture on dreams, Freud casually asked a young audience member what he did. In his autobiography, Moreno reported himself as having answered, ‘You analyze people’s dreams. I give them the courage to dream again. You analyze and tear them apart. I let them act out their conflicting roles and help them put the parts back together again’ (Moreno 1985). Moreno may have enjoyed telling this story in order to emphasize the extent to which he regarded his work as opposing the Freudian bias in mid-twentieth-century American psychotherapy, thereby compensating for the loss of spontaneous creativity in the cultural conserves of Western psychologies (see Feasey 2001).

Jung and Moreno never met. Certainly, their psychotherapeutic practices theoretically opposed each other in fundamental ways. Would they have found common ground on which to stand and speak to each other? For instance, what would Moreno have said about Jung’s statement:

the theatre is the place of unreal life; it is life in the form of images, a psychotherapeutic institute where complexes are staged; one can see there how these things work … So in inviting him to the theatre, [one] invites him to the staging of his complexes – where all the images are symbols or unconscious representations of his own complexes.

(Jung 1984, p. 12)

Or how would Jung have responded to Moreno’s voiced conviction that he felt inspired, not by Freud’s psychological materialism, nor by Marx’s economic materialism and the technological advances of modern industrialism, but, rather, by the tenets of the world’s great religions (Moreno 1947)? Would they have discussed the extent to which they both regarded the performativity of ‘healing’ in psychotherapeutic practices as inherently ‘religious’ in the etymological sense of the word, denoting, as it does in Latin, both ‘bond’ and ‘reverence’? Jung defined his Eros principle as a psychological concept sitting on top of a human mystery which he could not fathom. Moreno employed the Greek word ‘tele’ to define the connection ‘coming as if from a distance’ that binds human beings together, a fundamental and primary concern to which ‘transference’ bears only a faint resemblance.

But this is my editorial spirit wanting to jump to the promise implicit in the title of this book, to the cumulative force of the arguments in these essays. Better first to delineate some of the fundamental differences between Jung and Moreno and to hold that theoretical and practical opposition, before introducing the contributors who will be speaking creatively from that contradictory space.

Consider first the etymology of the word ‘complex’. The word, in English, French and German, derives from the Latin complexus, meaning ‘embrace’ or ‘sexual intercourse’, and from complecti, meaning ‘to entwine’, made up of the prefix com, meaning ‘together’, and plectere, meaning ‘to braid’.¹ In the natural and social sciences, the word ‘complex’ denotes a system composed of related parts that, coming together as a whole, manifest properties not evident in the individual parts themselves (see, for example, the work of the French philosopher Edgar Morin, On Complexity, 2008). In mathematics, a complex number consists of a real and an imaginary part, either of which can be zero. In psychology, complexes are organized groups of ideas and memories that exist, for the most part, outside awareness but that carry enormous affective power when activated. Here, embedded in the denotation of the word ‘complex’, is an image that surely interested Jung: something Other, which significantly entwines and alters the psychic system as a braided whole.

Freud regarded Jung’s empirical investigations of complexes as an important experimental corroboration of his theoretical concept of the unconscious. But Freud increasingly shunned the term ‘complex’ after Jung and Adler placed complexes at the centre of their theories as natural phenomena. Orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis regards complexes, including Freud’s Oedipus complex, as symptoms resulting from failed acts of repression, whereas Jung does not theorize complexes as synonymous with neurosis: in other words, for Jung, the experience of being ‘complexed’ may be painful, but it is not necessarily pathological. A feeling-toned complex is an image to which a highly charged affect is attached, and which is incompatible with the habitual attitude of the ego. Often attributable either to a trauma that splits off a fragment of the psyche or to a moral conflict in which it appears impossible to affirm the whole of one’s being, a complex is a splinter psyche that behaves with a remarkable degree of autonomy and coherence, overriding will and blocking memory.

Jung argues that the technique of personifying provides a psychotherapeutic means by which the ego can free itself from being possessed by an unconscious complex. To ‘personify’ means ‘to attribute a personal nature to an abstraction by giving it human shape’, ‘to embody an abstract quality’, ‘to provide a spirit with bodily form’. Jung observes that if, rather than simply suffering the complex’s often difficult affect, we deliberately permit the complex to manifest spontaneously to our conscious awareness as a personified image, then we depotentiate its power over our ego consciousness and make interpretation possible. Going one step further, if we employ ‘personifying a complex’ as active imagination, we can consciously direct psychic energy towards incarnating an unconscious complex; we compensate for a possibly one-sided power position maintained by ego-consciousness and momentarily privilege an unconscious potentiality.

Personifying unconscious contents can provide an effective way to claim the personified aspect as one’s own and, at the same time, to experience its autonomy and distinctness from ego consciousness. Personifying demands a dramatically engaged response to the unconscious as Other, in contrast to intellectualizing and conceptualizing it. As Jung explains, the more that possessing unconscious contents are lived and engaged with through personifying, the less intensely are they experienced as real (Jung 1929, para. 54–5). Splinter psyches are ontologically ‘unreal’, in the sense that they are not only disowned by the ego but often are disembodied, projected interpersonally onto an external Other. At the same time, ironically, unconscious complexes acquire an ontological status that is ‘more real than real’, since they insistently overwhelm ego consciousness with their reality and unseat the personality:

The characteristic feature of a pathological reaction is, above all, identification with the archetype. This produces a sort of inflation and possession by the emergent contents, so that they pour out in a torrent which no therapy can stop. Identification can, in favourable cases, sometimes pass off as a more or less harmless inflation. But in all cases identification with the unconscious brings a weakening of consciousness, and herein lies the danger. You do not ‘make’ an identification, you do not ‘identify yourself’, but you experience your identity with the archetype in an unconscious way and so are possessed by it.

(Jung 1934, para. 621)

Becoming conscious is, then, synonymous with reversing this process, with making real and integrating as much as possible what has been rendered ‘unreal’ – in other words, with incarnating what Jung would express in personified form as ‘disembodied spirit’. Jung employs his deliberately equivocal language of unconscious ‘complexes’, which he also calls ‘spirits’ or ‘gods’, in order to honour their ontological claim as unlived potentialities of the personality:

The essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. That is the technique for stripping them of their power. It is not too difficult to personify them, as they always possess a certain degree of autonomy, a separate identity of their own. Their autonomy is a most uncomfortable thing to reconcile oneself to, and yet the very fact that the unconscious presents itself in that way gives us the best means of handling it.

(Jung 1962, p. 187)

In this way, Jung pictures complexes forcefully, kinetically pushing the individual psyche towards a more genuine entwining of its parts.

An important component in Jung’s psychotherapeutic practice focuses on supporting the ego of the analysand up to the point that it can experience the autonomy of the unconscious complex and eventually reconcile itself to that psychic reality through a personified meeting. Andrew Samuels, Bani Shorter and Fred Plaut (1986) state this emphatically: ‘A patient who cannot personify tends merely to personalize everything. Analysis can be seen as an exploration of the patient’s relationship to his or her personifications’ (p. 108).

By contrast, Moreno’s psychotherapy addresses the psychosociological problem of the individual. According to Moreno, the self emerges through the roles one plays in relation to others, rather than the roles emerging from the self. In other words, Moreno locates the experience of selfhood in an external field of interpersonal relatedness. He draws maps and defines laws of social forces from the patterns that emerge when individuals interact spontaneously, and he proposes a triad of psychotherapeutic practices – group psychotherapy, sociometry, and psychodrama – to address the loss of spontaneity in what should be a naturally ongoing emergence of self.

Moreno addresses the suffering of the individual self within problems of role. He evaluates the effectiveness of a particular role in terms of the degree of spontaneity and creativity operating in the interpersonal relation: ‘Role-playing is an act, a spontaneous playing; role-taking is a finished product, a role conserve’ (Moreno 1960, p. 84). So, for Moreno, ‘role-taking’ signifies confining oneself to a finished, fully conserved, scripted interaction that does not permit the individual any degree of spontaneity or creativity, while ‘role-playing’ permits some degree of both, and ‘creating a role’ permits them to the highest degree. When we are possessed by or trapped in a role conserve, we are no longer able to interact spontaneously and creatively within that role, and we suffer from a loss of self. Moreno sees that the continually emerging self is threatened when a role is so ‘conserved’ that it eliminates possibilities for spontaneous and creative interaction.

To interact spontaneously and creatively requires that we constantly confront the unknown in ourselves and in others. The notion of self as a finished, perfected product is a comforting illusion, which the cultural conserves of groups and societies reinforce:

There is a shrewd motive in this procedure … because if only one stage of a creative process is a really good one, and all the others are bad, then this chosen stage substituting for the entire process can be memorized, conserved, eternalized, and can give comfort to the soul of the creator and order to the civilization of which he is a part.

(Moreno 1934, p. 363)

Moreno introduces his three-dimensional practice of psychotherapy as an intervention that compensates for this inclination to create conserves by working to make accessible once more the spontaneity of the individual self and the spontaneity of the society within which individual selves locate their selfhood.

In the first of Moreno’s three practices – group psychotherapy – individuals experience self in terms of their ability to participate spontaneously and creatively within a field of interpersonal relations. In the encounter with others, the individual learns to distinguish between experiences of projection and experiences of what Moreno calls ‘tele’. He differentiates between ‘projection’ (from the Latin meaning ‘to throw in front of one’) and ‘tele’. Projections throw in front of individuals a set of conserved roles, fixed vocabularies and familiar scripts, to which they are then confined. The effective practice of group psychotherapy provides a safe container within which the individual can witness and work to withdraw, as much as possible, these projections. But Moreno emphasizes that group psychotherapy should also provide experiences of role-play and of ‘flow’ between people as authentic here-and-now exchanges of attraction and repulsion. With his notion of tele, Moreno emphasizes an irrational non-verbal (as if ‘from afar’) processing of interpersonal relationships and the bonds which hold groups together:

Group cohesiveness, reciprocity of relationships, communication, and shared experiences are functions of tele. Tele is the constant frame of reference for all forms and methods of psychotherapy … Neither transference nor empathy could explain in a satisfactory way the emergent cohesion of a social configuration.

(Moreno 1960, p. 17)

Moreno emphasizes that the effective practice of group psychotherapy provides opportunities both for minimizing projections and optimizing the authentic communication of tele.

Moreno’s second element – sociometry – maps and evaluates networks of existing and preferred relationships. Sociometry is a phenomenological study of an individual’s or a group’s interpersonal choices. The emerging self is momentarily observed in time and space as it manifests in all its roles. Group psychotherapists also employ sociometry in order to track psychological mechanisms such as scapegoating within the group dynamic. They chart the group’s need to reinforce cohesion by creating a star and expelling an isolate. At the same time, they anticipate which individuals have in their repertoire of roles a collusive desire to carry the conserved role of scapegoat for the group. In the case of scapegoating, Moreno would argue that the effective practice of group psychotherapy depends on the capacity to measure the collective desire to isolate an individual member of the group as this sparks, and to re-integrate potential isolates back into the natural cohesiveness of the tele of the group. Sociometry is used to try to ensure that no individual fuses with the role of sacrificial Other, and that no group succeeds in banishing its own integral Otherness from its midst.

Moreno’s third component is the most familiar: psychodrama, in which all the guided mimetic activities are used to examine problems, to explore new role possibilities and to revitalize stale role-conserves. Psychodrama is ritualistic in the sense that psychodrama sessions are highly structured, moving through clearly demarcated phases both in time and space. It begins by identifying an individual as protagonist in whose service the group agrees to work, and then moves into a phase of incarnating the protagonist’s problem through dramatic action. It ends with observation and shared reflection, hoping to make possible a synthesis of the spontaneous insights experienced verbally and non-verbally during the action phase.

One important psychodrama tool is mirroring. In the most basic terms, mirroring entails a protagonist who enacts a moment. He or she then chooses someone from the group to play himself or herself, to re-enact the same moment as precisely as possible, while he or she steps out of the action in order to observe it. For Moreno, the elements of both enacting and observing are crucial for the possibility of psychotherapeutic synthesis. Individual insight resides potentially in the spontaneity and creativity of psychodramatic action, but the structure of a psychodrama session ritualistically contains the participants as they each move back and forth between acting and observing, between insight in action and insight in reflection.

Because he locates the self externally, Moreno is critical of Jung for defining the self in terms of the individual psyche. He considers Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious flawed, as leaping from a personal context to a universal context without sufficiently taking into account the psychology of groups and the positive phenomenon of tele (Moreno 1960, pp. 116–17). In Moreno’s psychotherapeutic practice, the individual self re-emerges within the paradox of acting and observing. This paradoxical play heals the individual who suffers from being trapped in a petrified role conserve, and it also challenges power-motivated cultural conserves with the spontaneity and the genuine social cohesiveness of tele.

For Moreno, projecting a power-driven role conserve causes a loss of self: ‘What conserved creativity truly represents, at best, is power, a means of expressing superiority when actual superiority has ceased to be available’ (Moreno 1960, p. 13). A role conserve skews negatively any new encounter by throwing in front of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theatre or therapy: A historical account
• 3 Psychodrama grounded in the perspective of analytical psychology
• 4 Jungian psychodrama
• 5 The drum time of psychodrama: Reflections on a Jungian psychodrama group
• 6 Jung, Moreno and dream enactment
• 7 Fairy tale drama: Enacting rituals of play, laughter and tears
• 8 Using psychodrama in analysis
• 9 Psychodrama and the resolution of the transference and counter-transference
• 10 The loss and gain of timing: Active imagination in performance
• 11 Encounters with Jung and Moreno on the road of bricks and moss
• Index