Adam Blatner
Words and Images from the Mind of Adam Blatner
Table of Contents:
Psychodrama
The World Needs You (Or, Why You Belong)
I read on a listserve news item of a colleague doing a workshop titled, "Where Do I Belong?" I wrote an email to my professional colleagues and, before erasing it, it occurred to me that it applied to lots of folks. I googled “The world needs you” and found many entries. Good! So what if […]
Therapy or Education?
Some has been written, indeed, of thinking of therapy as re-education! It is curious that methods of consciousness-expansion can be applied as therapy or education. My next (and last) project is to broaden action techniques, psychodramatic meth-ods, enhanced simulations, beyond psycho-therapy. There are tens of thousands of articles about applications in therapy, but Moreno wrote […]
This is “My Brave”
Moreno’s theory of group work did not necessarily involve psychodrama. Of course it bridges over naturally, but my emphasis here is that just doing it openly in a group has healing power. There is a website called www.thisismybrave.org that opens mental illness up wide! Wow!
Translations and Publication in Psychodrama
New technologies have arrived: There are programs that can help in translation, and other programs that can post translated papers linked with their originals. In light of these developments, I have hopes that much of the psychodrama literature can be posted and translated for the many people in other countries who don’t speak English. Many […]
Trauma, ACoA, Psychotherapy
The following are thoughts stimulated by reading a book by my friend Tian Dayton, who recently published The ACoA Trauma Syndrome: The impact of child pain on adult relationships, (2012, Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications Inc.). The book notes that substance abuse affects not only the person involved, but often the family members, and offers […]
Trusting the Moment
This is a book review about a newly released book , Trusting the Moment: Unlocking your creativity and imagination: a handbook for individual and group work. As you know, I’m all for promoting improvisation, and this book of warm-ups is rich in ideas about how to develop these skills. A number of such books have […]
Two More Things About Enhanced Simulations
First, it’s another word for Action Explorations. Second, it’s axiodramatic and sociodramatic as well as psychodramatic. All these are more complex ways of re-examining political, ethical, and social norms as they evolve. What was if not righteous, then normative, become ethically dubious, challengeable, “evil.” This has been one angle on history. In this last century, […]
Vitality Enhancement
Aha! So that’s what I’m really about! I must confess, though, that this term is just a fancy way of saying “having fun.” Maybe in some circumstances we need to pretend to be a bit snooty to appease the demand for functionality, for higher purpose. But really, we don’t need an excuse. If you think […]
Vitality Enhancement
I am concerned with the gradual growth and seductiveness of an increasing number of media that make it easier to “veg out” as a “couch potato” spectator. To challenge that, I want to remind people of a category of “folk art” activities that can happen in neighborhoods and communities of all types. This may include […]
What is Applied Theatre?
There’s an emerging field, a sub-set of the theatre arts, that differs from ordinary theatre in that it’s not done just for entertainment. It’s used for education, social action, community-building, recreation, personal development, therapy and rehabilitation, business, religion, and so forth. It’s been emerging for a few decades, but most modern books on theatre don’t […]
What Isn’t Said Overtly
I’m presenting at the annual meeting of the British Psychodrama Association, a keynote workshop on the general conference theme of innovation and integration in psychodrama. I have much to say didactically and will post that on my website—the workshop itself will be mainly experiential. The key innovation to be presented there is simply a heightening […]
What’s Up This Month
Oh, my, sometimes I think my mind is like an artist’s studio, an “atelier,” with various papers or books, presentations being prepared or books someday to write or revise, blogs to post, papers to complete on my website. It’s not one thing after another, it’s a little bit of this, and then, now that I […]
Why Action Explorations?
I have been viewing psychodrama from one abstract level higher, a category I call action exploration, a name for a category that includes psychodrama, sociodrama, spontaneity training, warm-ups, bibliodrama, and also process drama in education, applied improvisation in business and organizations, and other activities. Although it partakes of a few drama elements such as story […]
Why Enactment?
Enactment involves physically “doing” the action implied, rather than just thinking or even talking about it. It embodies the encounter that’s implied. Enactment is needed because it “anchors” what is expressed and associated insights in consciousness. One is more likely to remember the the intention behind the action or other thoughts that come to mind […]
Write It Up
As you might gather, I write easily and for fun, while many others find this daunting. I also advocate for the values offered by this medium—i.e., setting down in a stored form what you have learned. For some this is obvious, yet there are many who do, who act, who are involved in non-literate ways. […]