Wandering around between warm-up theory and role theory

Hi all, to progress our theorising, learning, and engagement with one another I am going to respond to a bunch of stuff from earlier and more recent times. I haven't worked out yet how to order blogs as they came so latest responses come up first. Which is OK but not so useful for folks who cam in late to the discussion. I'll work on it.

One thing I want to start off with is the thing that came to me yesterday while walking the dogs - which is my morning ritual. I concluded that we have  perhapsoverly narrowed down elements of our discussion, and this inlcudes Walter's post as well. This is because we are talking about warm-up to role and whether or not we can seperate out warm-up. Well, we clearly can because we do so everyday when we direct a drama. We follow the warm-up before us. Now this is often a warm-up to a role, thats a given, and often something we come to, the naming of the role, if the role is represented on stage for any amount of time. However we also know, witness, and work with warm-up, from within a role they are already in, warm-up to the other person (no role shift), warm-up to action (same role), warm-up to states of mind - all of which may also be in the same role. Within a role a person is able to warm-up to different things. This is a minor philosophical point but is important. It is what I noticed that we, as psychodramatists, notice when directing a drama. It is something only other dramatists would notice - wheteher psychodramatists, drama therapists, or dramatists working with actors. I'm planning on starting another blog on these implications.

Thanks Hamish: You present a good deal of your perspective of what knowing is. I find knowing takes me too much into the world of the Gnostics who believed there was something to know. While I do believe there are things to be known, I now regard “knowing” more like the perspective taken by Richard Dawkin’s notion of likelihood or reasonableness of the proposition. He argued in his book The God Delusion as to whether a proposition, such as the existence of the types of gods people where proposing, was at all likely, given what we know. Of course, this is all circular because it contains the use of ‘know’ in the definition of ‘know’. But, he was largely arguing from a probabilistic point of view – given what we believe we know – is it likely that the universe came about through gods and angels? So there is real value in presenting in a knowing fashion – as a director it gives the group and protagonist something to work with. However the next moment I may find what I knew to be suspect, at best. Which is often, ironically, the purpose of being knowing or appearing certain - it provokes and keeps things bubbling along.

Re: An inter-subjectivist – the first – that's a big argument. While I have a concept of inter-subjectivist I don’t know what anyone else means. Perhaps we need to footnote some of these things. If I understand the concept, or more, as what I take to be what people mean, inter-subjectivity is an idea that we create a subjectivity between us, and through our relationship. Or perhaps that is our relationship. Let me know if this is off-track. Gergon wrote a pretty readable book on the matter recently Relational Being – Beyond self and community.  I keep it for quiet times as I already have the ideas. Though he writes the whole book from the perspective of it being accurate rather than writing it as a concept or simple argument.

One element we often leave out, which I believe is the strength of psychodrama is the element of the observation, which by and of itself changes the observer and the system. In this part of the conversation, inter-subjectivist, we are leaving ourselves out as the director. This is very tentative.

Memory is sometimes fabricated – well according to the neuro-folks it is always fabricated – but accurate memory is made up of reasonably accurate bits. However, following a memory recall, according to the latest theory, we then lay down overlays onto the memory such that what is saved, as the memory, now includes elements of how we are when we are recalling it. Hence the value of psychodrama or other forms of therapy that include recall. Hence, also, the death of objectivity in terms of it being truthful or more truthful than something else.

Re Don’s comment to Hamish:  I say role is not observable because I believe it is the naming of it that gives it its particular role-like quality – prior to the role naming there are a series of actions and interactions. When we name a series of behaviours “Marcus Aurelius” we immediately do what the physicists complain about – when we decide the light is a particle it acts like one – when we decide it is a wave – its acts like one. When we name a role “Marcus Aurelius” the person acts like that. As an example – try renaming a role you have given someone in a totally different way. The naming hijacks the consciousness – and this is the power of the role name and why I like it. Finally the language serves a less random purpose. Your pictorial comments are of a similar nature - evocative.

However, if we name all conglomerations of actions in a context as role, without a name but by definition, then we are saying something else. Then we are saying, claiming really, that humans act as role acting beings and their functioning is according to roles. This may well be a valuable claim but it is not one I have pursued. Instead I have pursued how the naming and imagining roles into clumps of actions and responses has a powerful effect/affect.

Therefore maybe we are acting like there are two ‘roles’ that we are relating to – one is the immediate role undefined and un-described that we respond to and relate to in moment to moment living – the other is the construct that we use to make sense of things – this second role is a construct and includes a name.

Don, to argue the claim of a role to only be there when enacted is, I think, to say there is no ‘thing’ like a role in a person. Which I like, as it simplifies the claims I might make about roles. Colloquially, I may talk about the roles a person has, and that becomes, by default, roles they have in them. However, if they are in me, where do they reside, and before long we end up with Adam’s assertion of the controller roles which oversea the other roles. See a humorous critique of the movie Inside Out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZvW-pDDs9U at the 3.15 minute mark – where they use twilight zone music and suggest that the controlling role, has roles in herself, as well, and thus begins the infinite role regression then unfolds. However – role emerging as a response does not require internal roles rather internal responses that produce a role – then role emerges in response and does not without the response. Here is the wikipedia version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

Don I wonder if you believe warm-up and role cannot be separated then I am probably talking about role, from your point of view, and continually calling it warm-up? That may explain some of our seemingly differing perspectives.

I like to think that your interior – is my exterior and I may be objective – hence observation and psychodrama.

Don some of the writing on this sense of me-ness suggests it is neurologically created by a section of our brain, which is why we feel like "me" in all the roles we enact in life or on the stage – it is another elements that allows psychodrama to ‘work’. When this section is damaged, a person loses their sense of self as a single person. It is also how I am able to demonstrate warm-up by having a protagonist shift their focus from one scene to another and at the same time they feel like themselves. When we reverse roles we still feel like ourselves. A remarkable capacbility.

Phenomena - something at the basis of our perception is there.  We could describe it phenomenological like as if we saw it for the first time.  But we have been immersed in Moreno's theory,  we see the phenomena through the lenses of Moreno, at least warm up as part of the Canon of Creativity - where it leads us from a conserve to something new. Or as warm up to a role - from role theory.  And more than that we embrace the laboratory of the theatre, with an audience the more these terms make sense.  

To understand warm up in the psychodrama context we can't remove the context of theatre, the canon of creativity or the theory of role.

Example: I watched a child (18) months put a Lego (Duplo) train together - she concentrated,  figuring how the carriages connected and how new blocks could be clicked onto the carriages, she was in a role of a budding engineer, using conserved materials in a new way, spontaneity in that it was a new response to an old situation. And I'd say she was warmed up to the role.  She was a protagonist in her own drama, and perhaps aware of me as a quiet audience offering an occasional Bravo. Then another adult came into the room. Let's do roly-poly on the floor. I saw it as cutting across the child's warm up.

Amazingly it happened. But I noticed a moment of reluctance,  role conflict, some sadnes at not been seen as the enginreer.  But a quick transition was made to raukus fun on the floor, a new role play. Role flexibility.

I think in that description I use the Morenian terms adeqately, I draw (unconsciously) on the basis of the terminology in the Canon, as well as role theory.

Warm up and role are not separate from the frame work of Morenian discourse, and to isolate them robs them of their richness, their power to convey, they have special meaning In psychodrama, but are easily grasped by lay people.

Warm up in the territory of role

Role as phenomena

Pragmatics of role

About warmup

Problems with viewing warm up independent of role and spontaneity

Hi Peter thanks for taking the time to think about and post this paper. It’s a worthwhile area to reflect on in my view and as I have been reading it I have had quite a few thoughts.

I find I agree with you that warm up is a phenomena while role is an abstraction. While we come to know and name both the warm up and role through a phenomenological process of experiencing and role reversing with the other. Warm up is direct and immediate while appreciating role involves experiencing and also considering at least three more layers of complexity each at greater level of abstraction than immediate experience.

The association I have as I read your article is to quantum physics. It turns out that when observing light at the quantum level if you look for particles you will see particles of light while if you look for waves you will see waves of light. I think it is the same with warm-up and role theory. If we look for the warm up process we will see and experience a process of warming up and this will lead to us describing a warm-up process. If on the other hand when we seek to name the roles present we will also be able to do this. So I find I would have a series of circles with role names each emerging sequentially from the last through time. However at the same time I would have a series of triangles as in your lower diagramme describing a series of warming up processes.

When I think this way about it, it becomes necessary to describe the relationship between the warm up and the role (you are doing this when you have a triangle and circle interacting i think). They are not the same thing. One way of approaching this is to think about why we use the phrase ‘warm up to role’. The notion of warmup to role is very helpful because it draws our attention to the period of time in which a person is becoming ready to enact a role, and this is the period where change can occur at the level of the phenomenon of the warm up which can lead to the enactment of a different role.

On the other hand if we seek to name the role we become conscious of many things that relate to the role. I believe there is a consensus in our association that role exists in the present and is only what is directly observable in the present i.e. the role is not somehow inside the person waiting to come out. I can go along with this only if it means a few important things: 1 The ability to name a role accurately is a developmental activity, that is, naming a role accurately is directly correlated with the degree of role reversal the role-namer can produce at that point in time; 2 Every role is developed in response to a social system and the other roles the person has previously developed up to that point in their lives. This means when a role is enacted it is enacted out of an expectation that particular kinds of responses will be forth coming; these expectations are often unconscious (or not in the awareness of the person) and will be maintained with a degree of rigidity commensurate with the experience of the actor in the social systems where the role has developed. 3 Notions of coping and fragmenting relate as much to the role system as they do to the particular role, sometimes the phrase coping gestalt is used to indicate that a role is only a coping response in some situations and it may in-fact be a progressive response in other situations. Calling the role a restrictive solution or coping and naming it as moving towards, moving away or against is an activity that only makes sense in the context of a role system. Roles do not exist in isolation and the context of the role (the role system) is perhaps most important in appreciating the person.

A little more about point 1: In Psychodrama Vol 1 Moreno claims that the term counter transference implies a lack of mutuality. He says why not say transference and transference rather than transference and counter transference. I have been thinking about this and it has occurred to me that transference and transference is a little like saying ‘role enacted from old experiences gained in a role system now present in the memories of the person’ and ‘another role enacted from old experiences gained in a different role system now present in the memories of the other person’. What is present with transference and transference is a failure to role reverse. A person is reacting to what is said or done because of particular experiences they have had in their life which they warm up to in response to another person. On the other hand the term counter transference includes the notion of role reversal. When I role reverse, experiences arise in my body that correlate more to the person I am doubling than to my own experiences. Perhaps I can relate to the experiences because I have felt a similar way at some time in my life also. However, I remain aware of the other person, including how these experiences have meaning for them, I am oriented to them and the role system in which these experiences came about for them. Of course whether something is a transference or counter transference is mystical perhaps only knowable in hind sight.  Importantly, though, Moreno was saying its important that the therapist does not place themselves above the patient, however this appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the term countertransference and the power relationships implied.