Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Getting Personal in Experiential Learning
A friend asked me to clarify the difference between psychodrama and sociodrama and the spectra in between. He wrote, “Interestingly sometimes in the past when I started out doing a sociodrama in teaching a group of therapists come up with some themes such as how to deal with an angry patient, someone may volunteer to [...]
Posted in Psychodrama, Psychological Literacy | No Comments
Integrating Methods of Psychotherapy
Increasingly clinicians are integrating a variety of expressive therapy modalities in with psychodrama, and the point is that wisely done, this is fine. There is no need to be purist: In a recent book by Carnabucci & Ciotola on Eating Disorders they seamlessly incorporate other modalities with action, including music, art, exercise, yoga, Reiki, and [...]
Posted in Psychodrama, Psychotherapy and Psychiatry | No Comments
Mandalas
For the last several years I’ve become especially intrigued with the art form of mandala-making, and especially my own form, which often involves making variations of nine circles in a circle. (See a recent example). This has no intrinsic meaning other than it appeals to me intuitively, but were I to try to put into [...]
Posted in Autobiographical, Foolin Around, Play and Spontaneity, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
Problems with “Past Lives”
Someone asked me for my thoughts about the theory of “past lives”—a take-off on reincarnation. First, I think the mind is a hundred times faster and more clever than what we think it is, and it can generate quite compelling and vivid fantasies that seem like realities. In a multi-dimensional universe, perhaps they are a [...]
Posted in Follies, Mind-Spectrums, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
A Confession of Faith
A personal myth: Which is to say, The older I get, I sort of think the following: Not that I believe any of this is literally true, of course. It is such a metaphor! But, seriously, I do live deeply into it: That God/Universe is Awakening In a billion galaxies [...]
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Enactment & Improvisation
While the psychodrama community seems to be knowledgeable about the history of psychodrama, it seems that many are hardly aware of the developments in related fields. The same might be said for people in those related fields: drama therapy; drama in education; improv in business and organizations; Theatre of the Oppressed; Bibliodrama; Spontaneity development in [...]
Posted in Psychodrama, Social-Depth Psychology (Sociometry) | No Comments
The Mind-Field
There’s everything we think is material, and then there’s the mind-field, which is inestimably vaster. It involves the (many?) dimensions of consciousness, including our own levels and probably fuzzing into hyper-consciousness. It probably fuzzes into hypo-consciousness, the qualities of mind of a leaf or a cell or a virus or maybe even a grain of [...]
Posted in Mind-Spectrums, Psychological Literacy, Psychology, Spirituality and Philosophy | No Comments
“My Precious” (Trash?!)
It doesn’t have to be a magic ring that could make you invisible if you wore it—and which imparted a kind of “high” that made you want to wear it a lot—, as it was for the weird frog-man character, “Gollum” in the Hobbit stories by Tolkien. It can be a plastic ring that you [...]
Posted in Autobiographical, Current Events, Play and Spontaneity | No Comments
“Twidiocracy”
Ah, new words. This one, in an article online: My comment: seeking connectedness through twitter and so forth: It’s not a religion. It’s just the latest intoxicant. Think of it, having followers! wow! Not that it doesn’t have a function. I acknowledge this: But now the electronic media has figured out a way to get [...]
Posted in Current Events, Mind-Spectrums, Social-Depth Psychology (Sociometry) | No Comments
Psychodrama Resources
Just to spread the word: the Executive Committee of the Australia & Aotearoa-New Zealand Psychodrama Association recently decided that in line with our strategic priority that psychodrama be valued and more widely known, all AANZPA journal articles be available for free general access online. All Journal articles are now publicly available from the AANZPA website. [...]
Posted in Play and Spontaneity, Psychodrama, Social-Depth Psychology (Sociometry) | No Comments