Adam Blatner

It’s time here in the early 21st century to recognize that many procedures that have arisen from the context of “therapy” have far wider application! (It’s no more daring to note this than to note that there are now many thousands more applications for computers and associated technologies than there were back in the 1950s.) What is happening is that methods which use improvisation, enactment, and collaborative creativity become technologies that will continue to mature for the next generation or more. they serve a goal beyond therapy, a goal of “lifelong re-creation,” or “life-enhancement.”

I know there’ are words like lifelong education and the Human Potential movement and such, but their semantic associations still are problematic. For many education is something only for kids, and the unconscious assumption still holds: When you’re grown up you should—if you’re okay—know all you are supposed to know. We now know that deep and character-shifting un-learning and re-learning may happen on several occasions in the course of adult life and elderhood.

Certainly I honor psychodrama, psychiatry, drama therapy and the medical model—these are, after all, my roots! I’m just sayin’ that the tools being developed are greater than “therapy” and go also into coaching, business, spiritual development, spontaneity development for elders and others as well as for kids, social consciousness-raising, etc.!