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ABSTRACT
Jung was not interested in exploring group dynamics within the many dimensions of concrete social reality that the authors claim also contributes to how we are formed as individuals in addition to psychical phenomena. Our interactions with these concrete and psychical phenomena have lingering effects on both the individual and the intersecting social worlds to which we are inured across the planet and through time. The authors argue that sociodrama facilitates the exploration of uncritically held ideological belief structures that are influenced by these interactions that can hinder our ability to bear responsibility for our transactions within any collective. The authors’ theoretical assumptions that support sociodramatic exploration within an academic conference environment are elaborated, including details about a diversity sociodramatic exploration the authors conducted during the International Association for Jungian Studies (IAJS) conference in Cape Town, South Africa in 2017. The article further includes a depiction and critique of this sociodramatic demonstration that occurred as an example of its applicability in conferences such as this one.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Siyat Ulon, (Taiwan), MD, MA, TEP is in private practice in Taipei and teaches psychodrama to medical staff in Far Eastern Memorial Hospital and Formosa Institute of Psychodrama and Depth Psychology.
Robin McCoy Brooks, (USA), MA, TEP, Jungian Psychoanalyst is in private practice in Seattle, WA. She is a founding member of the New School for Analytical Psychology and a member of the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian Analysts.
Notes
1. Eminent civil rights activist and academic Angela Davis made this remark in the forward of the text titled: when they call you a terrorist a black lives matter memoir (Citation2018). The forward is an extraordinary commentary on the status of racial activism in the United States today reflecting Davis’s lifelong experience that began in the civil rights movement in the 60’s.
2. See Alex Labon Hinton’s (Ed.), Transitional Justice Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence, (Citation2010) for a compelling collection of essays that focus on the convolutions inherent in the real world of local justice. This frame of the concept of ‘transitional justice’ involves a process of peoples recognizing and reconciling past collective wrongs from an anthropological perspective.
3. Project Quest was co-founded by medical psychologist Lusijah Marx and co-visionary Lucas Harris in 1989 having established its 501c3 non-profit status and remains a thriving clinic today. Lucas Harris died in 1996 only months after HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) became available that would rapidly curtail the death rate from AIDS in developed countries. See Brooks (Citation2018) for further discussion on the psychological/philosophical dynamics behind the emergence of this center.
4. While Freud mostly concentrated on the effects of the unconscious on individual behavior, he did extend the application of his thought to groups and society. In (Citation1912/1999), he published Totem and Taboo where he analyzed anthropological material through a psychoanalytic lens. Most notably, Freud published Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Citation1921/1990) where he attempted to formulate what comprised a group, how the mental life of the individual was influenced by the many and what the nature of this change was. Later, Melanie Klein would reformulate and extend these concepts in their relationship to the mother/infant dyad (projective identification) and Wilfred Bion (who entered a training analysis with Klein) would extend basic object relations theory into an extensive theory of group and organizational behavior in his research as a member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London (Citation1961/Citation2004). See Robert De Board’s (Citation1978/Citation2014) informative overview of these Freudian thinkers (and others) that influences the thinking of group dynamics today.
5. We are underscoring the significance of Jung’s historical insight that elaborated a socially constructed self, albeit limited to an almost exclusive fidelity to the objective psyche.
6. It is well beyond the scope of this paper to define what we mean by group analysis. For the purposes of this project, however we both hold that the principles of psychoanalysis (whatever tradition one follows) can be applied to group practice.
7. We emphasize the word ‘aspects’ here because just as in a psychoanalytical treatment, what is out of awareness or unconscious amidst a collective is also revealed in traces and left to the individual or individuals in the group to interpret. Unlike Jung, who believed he alone had the personal authority to interpret the archetypal presences that emerged in dreams etc., we are inclined to follow what emerges in a sociodramatic process and note it phenomenologically, more as Jung did in his treatment of the personal unconscious (Jung, Citation1935, para. 190, para. 174; Brooks, Citation2013, pp. 88–89).
8. Sociodrama is a methodology that emerged from the theory and practice of its founder, Jacob L. Moreno, a Romanian-American psychiatrist and sociologist. Moreno (1889–1974) is generally considered to have coined the term ‘group therapy’ and developed the methodologies known today as psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy. There are international societies for psychodrama and group therapy that strictly credential its practice around the world.
9. We are using the term ‘collective unconscious’ liberally here and not adhering to Jung’s epistemological foundationalism that shaped his metaphysics. Instead, we are referring to what is estranged from knowledge from the wider contexts of a patient’s and our own lives within these broader social contexts.
10. It is beyond the scope of this paper to describe the various kinds of action techniques that a psychodramatist has in one’s back pocket. We direct the interested reader to a few classic texts on the subject: Sternberg and Garcia (Citation1989), Blatner (Citation2000), Kellermann (Citation2007).
11. Butler insists: ‘Your story is never my story’ (Citation2005, pp. 39–40).
12. Is it realistic to think we can create a safe and cohesive environment in the first place in a two-hour span with people who don’t know each other in a professional conference where persona is often sacred? Even the terms may appear cliché or promote a false promise of solidarity in a post-modern age that has shown us that experience is at best provisional and fleeting. With this proviso, the challenge of writing this paper is to not rigidly theoretically systematize the kinds of experiences that may occur in a sociodramatic exploration. Instead, we attempt to describe, from our experiences in the field, certain general conditions that appear to contribute to the feeling of safety (somebody else is keeping me in mind) and enough cohesion (the feeling that I am at this moment in time a part of something outside of myself) so that participants want to self-disclose with each other.
13. There are times when facilitators need to teach on their feet about the difference between what is assertive versus what is destructive, or limit or contain an excessive display of emotiveness that may distract or detract from the direction of the larger group process. We also do not want to encourage over-self disclosure where the participants might feel ashamed afterwards because there was not adequate time to integrate what was happening. See Kellermann (Citation2007) for a rich discussion about the special needs that tend to be inherent when working with of sociodrama explorations of varying demographics and sizes.
14. Often the structural frame of intellectual conferences does not save enough space for conversation amongst participants about the ideas conveyed in a lecture in the first place or much less for real discourse that includes the expression of experience. Discourse, as the pre-cursor to the ethical relation is being referred to here from a Levinasian lens. From this view, what is un-thought or the pre-cognitive affective disposition towards another or others (or a text) is the nexus of subjectivity (or self in Jungian parlance) and to thought and the ‘situation of discourse’ [to saying] (Levinas, Citation1996, p. 9). Discourse from this frame is embodied first and then thought. Heidegger referred the pre-theoretical level of transcendental experience between oneself and others as an original enigmatic ground of being through which being was constituted through crises (Heidegger, Citation2010, pp. 58–59). In his early secular engagement with the works of the apostle Paul, Heidegger would temporalize Kant’s transcendental structures of knowledge by extending authentic knowledge of the individual into the communal milieu (Heidegger, Citation2010, pp. 70–73; Brooks, Citation2018).
15. This notion was originally rearticulated and cited from a lecture delivered by Lacanian academic Mari Rutti in the Psychology & the Other conference titled: ‘The Other as Face in post-Levinasian and post-Lacanian Ethics,’ October 5, 2013, in Cambridge, MA.
16. These primal questions, ‘Who are you and what do you want (of me)?’ are reminiscent of Lacan’s (Citation1981) elucidation of the infant’s first traumatic encounter with the (m) other that is enigmatically lodged at the core of human experience and remains in the background of life like a spectral presence. Jean Laplanche’s extension of this thought can be found in later works (Citation1999), with an excellent secondary text elucidation found in Ladson Hinton’s accessible article (Citation2009). With this thought in mind, we can imagine how the psychodynamic realities of individuals are played out throughout our lifetimes as they reverberate within our social worlds.
17. In situations where various forms of oppression remain endemic, the singular ‘who I am’ can be reduced to ‘what I am’ where a social identity is forged by the compliance of the individual and the public forces at play that reduces one into a thing. We are all exposed to these phenomena at all times. Self-revelation in oppressive environments is dangerous and unusual. The participant responded from the register of social identity. See Diane Perpich’s engaging text on The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Citation2008) for a full discussion of the topic of normativity in relation to identity politics.
18. Arendt borrowed the ancient Greek idea of polis and used it metaphorically throughout her political/philosophical works. In her usage of the term, she was not only referring to the (Greek) city/state institutions of political power but also a more general usage that described a public space or ‘realm of action and speech’ that either has already occurred in the history of the world or to its possibilities. A polis can be established amongst a community of free and equal citizens with the purpose of sharing words and deeds thoughtfully (Arendt, Citation1958, pp. 198–199).
19. For example, see this very relevant link to an equity blogging site titled ‘Fakequity’ centered in Seattle WA: https://fakequity.com/author/fakequity/