Dramatherapy

The Nature of Interruption

Richard Hougham, Bryn Jones, Richard Hougham, Bryn Jones

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367487577
• eBook ISBN: 9781000424522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

This book investigates the nature and phenomena of interruption in ways that have relevance for contemporary dramatherapy practice. It is a timely contribution amidst an 'age of interruption' and examines how dramatherapists might respond with agency and discernment in personal, professional and cultural contexts.

The writing gathers fresh ideas on how to conceptualise and utilise interruptions artistically, socially and politically. Individual chapters destabilise traditional conceptions of verbal and behavioural models of psychotherapy and offer a new vision based in the arts and philosophy. There are examples of interruption in practice contexts, augmented by extracts from case studies and clinical vignettes. The book is not a sequential narrative – rather a bricolage of ideas, which create intersections between aesthetics, language and the imagination. New and international voices in dramatherapy emerge to generate a radical immanence; from Greek shadow puppetry to the Japanese horticultural practice of Shakkei; from the appearance of 'ghosts' in the consulting room to images in the third space of the therapeutic encounter, interruptions are reckoned with as relevant and generative.

This book will be of interest to students, arts therapists, scholars and practitioners, who are concerned with the nature of interruption and how dramatherapy can offer a means of active engagement.

1

“We find ourselves in finding vision”

Imagination and participation in Sesame dramatherapy

Will Pritchard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042792-2

This chapter considers the contemporary relevance of the ideas of Owen Barfield (1898–1997) to the praxis of Sesame dramatherapy. An oft-forgotten member of the Oxford Inklings, Barfield had a profound influence on the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R Tolkien, and thereby on mythopoetic fantasy literature in the English-speaking world. But the scope of Barfield’s thought was far wider than literature, extending into philosophy, aesthetics, philology, psychology, spirituality, myth, politics, science and the evolution of consciousness. Our focus will be Barfield’s conceptions of imagination and participation as they relate to dramatherapy. I will begin with a discussion of participation, Barfield’s term for the changing relationship between subject and object. I will contextualise this within Barfield’s conception of the evolution of consciousness through history. For a more detailed consideration I will draw upon concepts from fellow-travellers in Romantic epistemology: first, I consider different ways meaning can manifest in different modes of participation, drawing on Henri Bortoft’s hermeneutics, and consider this in the context of Sesame sessions. Following this I will discuss the different forms of imagination delineated by Coleridge, and consider their application to the use of myth in Sesame. Imagination will be considered as a form of willed interruption, with implications for healing and deepening our lived experience.

Barfield was an inheritor of Coleridge’s conception of Organic Imagination. His philosophy could be considered a twentieth century development of a Romantic ideal: the creative imagination as healer. As Harold Bloom described,

The secret of Romanticism, from Blake and Wordsworth down to the age of Yeats and Stevens, increasingly looks like a therapy in which consciousness heals itself by a complex act of invention.

(337)

This sentiment echoes throughout Barfield’s work. Barfield contextualised our present alienation from nature and ourselves within a historical evolution of consciousness. Barfield saw in the history of words many relics of fundamental transformations in meaning, indicating corresponding changes in the way human experience was structured. For Barfield, the history of words and ideas demonstrates how once humanity participated wholly and unconsciously in nature, and has since evolved an experiential separateness, giving rise to individualised consciousness and greater freedom. Barfield’s seed metaphor summarises the history of human consciousness in his conception:

We may very well compare the self of man to a seed. Formerly what is now the seed was a member of the old plant, and as such was wholly informed with a life not wholly its own. But now the pod or capsule has split open, and the dry seed has been ejected. It has attained to a separate existence. Henceforth one of two things may happen to it: either it may abide alone, isolated from the rest of the earth, growing dryer and dryer, until it withers up altogether; or, by uniting with the earth it may blossom into a fresh life of its own … uniting itself with the Spirit of the Earth, with the Word, it may blossom into the imaginative soul, and live. It differs from the seed only in this, that the choice lies with itself.

(2012: 79–80)

Barfield appropriated the word participation to mean an extra-sensory relationship between the observer and the observed, subject and object, shaping our experience of both. The “participation mystique” of ancient cultures described above, which Barfield called primal participation, was the ancient human experience of nature as living and meaningful, and of oneself as part of this life. According to Barfield this meant less or even no separation between subject and object, and therefore less of a sense of individuality, self or freedom. Jung similarly spoke of a primitive consciousness in which nature and objects “speak” (1997: 453). The history of language, art and ideas demonstrated for Barfield that gradually, primal participation gave way to our modern mode of consciousness. Various (otherwise irreconcilable) worldviews existing throughout human history could therefore be seen as somewhat contingent on the kind of consciousness that prevailed at different stages. For example, animism and supra-individual mythic wisdom were expressions of the “participation mystique” of ancient cultures. Equally, the positivism and existentialism contemporary to Barfield’s work could be seen as symptomatic of a more modern mode of consciousness. As consciousness changes, so he argued, the phenomena or “collective representations” also change (2011: 34–5).

Our modern consciousness is one in which we experience subject and object as separate, with a sense that objects exist relatively independent of us. Symptomatic of this rift are theories of art where meaning depends exclusively on the spectator, or the scientific search for objective knowledge through limiting the participation of the subject as much as possible. Although these extremes have been challenged from multiple directions since Barfield’s time, a gap between subjective meaning and objective knowledge remains culturally pervasive, with many benefits and challenges. Below I will show how we continue to participate in the phenomena (or in Barfield’s less dualistic formulation, “participate the phenomena”), but that modern participation goes unnoticed. Barfield believed that noticing and experiencing our participation would open up new possibilities for how we relate to the world and ourselves (2011: 23).

Comparable to individuation, a future form of participation would not be a regression, but a new relationship forged by creative imagination. The new kind of participation sought by Barfield was one that retained a wakeful modern consciousness, whilst regaining the meaningful and numinous experience of reality that characterised primal participation (2011: 146–7). This evolution of consciousness, with imagination as salvation, is in a sense Barfield’s true myth which contextualises present-day experience. Appropriately this myth is founded on the fruits of modern consciousness, in that it is the product of Barfield’s study of the history of language and ideas, and of their changing meanings.

Jung provides the Sesame approach with its orientation and praxis, and the parallels with Barfield’s perspective are unsurprising. Sharing an admiration for Goethe, and with roots in Romanticism and German Idealism, Jung and Barfield sought to heal the contemporary crisis of meaning through an imaginative engagement with life. Where they might differ most is philosophically: although Jung adopted Kant’s epistemology (albeit inconsistently), seeing archetypal dynamics as expressions of unknowable noumena, Barfield held that in principle it was possible for human beings to participate as knowers at the deepest level of reality. In contemplating the defining influence of Jung’s Romantic psychology on Sesame praxis, we can consider what implications a contemporaneous Romantic philosophy might have for our work. This interdisciplinary bridging in the name of therapy is in the spirit of James Hillman who, in a conversation with David Lavery, described Barfield as “one of the most neglected, important thinkers of the 20th Century” (Lavery 2009).

Barfield’s most pertinent concepts for Sesame dramatherapy are his most experientially grounded, concerning aesthetic experience, perception, imagination and meaning. From its inception, Sesame dramatherapy has privileged embodied experience over discursive knowledge and interpretation. It is often characterised as an “oblique” approach, fostering a “symbolic attitude” in both therapist and client (Hougham and Jones 2017: 30). This is intended to develop a relationship between consciousness and the unconscious. This presents a challenge for scholarship concerning the Sesame approach, in that healing is sought less through the interpretive use of psychology most known to popular culture, and more through facilitating experiential shifts in consciousness through the imagination. Some changes are outwardly ritualised: for example, a session might include a “bridge-in” where symbolically a new realm is entered. Here a mythic story may be told and then enacted, followed by a “bridge-out” signifying a return toward everyday experience. Other inner shifts might be more subtle and individual, such as the momentary significance of an interaction between people in movement, and the multi-modal attunement that might take place between them. In either case the actual nature of the transition and its implications for healing can be ineffable. Perhaps part of the value of the Sesame approach is its efficacy in forging links between these different levels of meaning, allowing wordless, symbolic and affective experience a crucial place among other states of being in the same session. As an aid to reflection on these states and their value for therapy, Barfield provides a language of participation, which can guide our thinking concerning different qualities of experience. I hope to show that this conception of participation provides a helpful language for, and perspective on, therapeutic practice.

How might we think about imagination? What role does it or can it have in dramatherapy? We can begin with small observations from everyday experience. Take a moment to look around you, taking in your surroundings as you read this. Notice an object within arm’s reach.

How did you do it? In all likelihood “noticing” was barely necessary; it is common for us to experience ourselves as subjects in a world of already-given objects. However, diverse schools of thought recognise that for these “objects” (and more broadly all appearances) to be present to us, our participation is necessary. Our sensory and cognitive participation is required; without cognition the object you attended to would not be experienced as an object, let alone as that object. Years of cognitive development have enabled you to distinguish it from what would otherwise be “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”, as William James described the experience of a baby. Nevertheless, our cognitive participation in the phenomena generally remains unnoticed. For this reason we experience a world of phenomena that seem to exist without our participation, and we experience ourselves as separate subjects. Only when the cognitive process is disrupted do we tend to notice our participation in phenomena (see Figure 1.1). We depend on interruption to experience it. With the duck-rabbit popularised by experimental psychologist Joseph Jastrow, we can note what we saw first, and can even explore moving between the two perceptions in our seeing. In current parlance we might say: we can in fact “unsee” the rabbit, and the duck can be created in our new seeing (and vice-versa).

Figure 1.1 Jastrow’s duck rabbit (Jastrow, 1899)

In this case “duck head” or “rabbit head” is what Bortoft called the “organising idea”, by which percepts take on form within our seeing. Similarly we notice this activity in ourselves when we misperceive something at a glance. Barfield called this activity “figuration”, which he defined as the unity of various faculties with perception in forming our experience of the world:

When I “hear a thrush singing,” I am hearing not with my ears alone, but with all sorts of other things like mental habits, memory, imagination, feeling and (to the extent at least that the action of attention involves it) will. Of a man who merely heard in the first sense, it could meaningfully be said that “having ears (i.e. not being deaf) he heard not”.

(2011: 20–21)

Imagination is often a more noticeable component of our experience of hearing than other senses, as the sound may be accompanied by a (usually half-noticed) mental image. But as we have seen, it is equally a part of our seeing, albeit less noticed. Following Kant, Coleridge termed this fundamental constructive activity, the active part of perception, “primary imagination”, “the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception” (2014: 101). The distinction Coleridge made between primary and secondary imagination, and between these and fancy, will be instructive below. This is the sense in which, although we experience ourselves as standing over against a world of pre-formed objects, this could not occur without our imaginative participation.

Part of what prevents us from noticing our participation in the phenomena is that it is necessarily habitual and automatic. If it were not, we would frequently be distracted, confused or overwhelmed by perceptions. Equally we could be powerfully absorbed in perception, which might be very pleasurable. Practitioners working with people with severe autism and other learning disabilities may recognise these experiences. The perceptual world is experienced as complete and “finished” due to the unconscious activity of primary imagination. If you pick up the object that you noticed earlier, and really open your attention to its sensory qualities, you are introducing an interruption to this automatic process and allowing new perceptions to emerge. As subjects in these experiences we become more receptive. But generally, our experience of the perceptual world is not like this unless deliberately cultivated. For this reason we remain unconscious of our participation in a world that seems “finished” and comparatively closed to us.

Coleridge spoke of how “in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand” (2008: 314). Imagination both promises and depends on moving out of automatised, habitual perception. This is the main sense in which we will speak of interruption. Life might introduce such an interruption without our willing it, but for the most part we will focus on imagination as a willed disruption of the perceptual process, and of our everyday experience, that opens new possibilities.

Barfield saw the habitual, unconscious participation of modern humanity as the precondition for the positivist world-conception, and of any conception of our consciousness as only an arbitrary addition to the world, enclosed within our skulls. Both positivism and existentialism were contemporary. In this sense the evolution of consciousness is also expressed in the history of ideas. After the “participation mystique” experienced by primal humanity, Barfield described how individualised ego-hood, distinct from the increasingly objectified world, emerged in different cultures. Even as late as medieval scholastic philosophy, Barfield notes how nature is still conceived of in terms of a relationship between natura naturata (literally “nature natured”) and natura naturans (“nature naturing”). This speaks to a perception still experienced among medieval Europeans of a living, ensouled nature-activity (hence the verb “naturing”) working behind sensible nature. “Nature natured” referred to nature perceived through the senses, understood as the finished product of the living-becoming nature behind it. This finished nature was more akin to the objectified nature we experience today (2014: 28). At the same time the Realist scholastics were in conflict with the Nominalists, who conceived of ideas not as living meanings behind nature, but had begun to understand ideas as names given to a reality already existing independent of human thought. In this sense medieval philosophy provides a snapshot of changing human consciousness, with an older sense of participation beginning to give way to a more modern experience of nature as separate from us and objectified, with the possibility of forming conceptual theories about it emerging.

Barfield describes the experience of nature that has gradually emerged since the Renaissance as one of

isolation, loneliness, materialism, loss of faith in the spiritual world, above all, uncertainty. The soul has to make...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1. “We find ourselves in finding vision”: Imagination and participation in Sesame dramatherapy
• 2. Image of the mind’s eye
• 3. The shakkei of dramatherapy
• 4. Encounter and engagement with patriarchy
• 5. Myth interrupting
• 6. This coming guest
• 7. Dreamdance
• 8. Dramatherapy and Greek Traditional Shadow Puppetry
• 9. Intuition: Interrupter or interrupted?
• 10. Disrupted narratives
• 11. Experiences of interruption: Listening to the voices of dramatherapists in training
• 12. Ghosts
• 13. Sesame folklore
• Index