Adam Blatner

Psychodrama research falls victim to the same pitfalls as psychotherapy research: The mind is many-leveled. There is thinking, and thinking about thinking, and pathological and unconscious dynamics, namely the multi-leveled functionality of symptoms. Symptoms are also expressions of the deep self. (I confess to being influenced by the “wild analyst” Georg Groddek, who was a physician in Baden-Baden in the first third of the last century, knew Freud dimly, wrote The Book of the It.) Alas, this is also true of medical illness, but less so. The body-mind will express its predicament often as physical illness—although how useful it is to call it “psychosomatic” is arguable. What is true about some forms of ambivalence is that the conflict cannot be adequately expressed in words. Healing comes from allowing it to be in consciousness, and to be healed by more mysterious operations. There is nothing truly mysterious, only that our limited habits of mind cannot track the explanations or the healing.

My point is that mental illness represents more than quirks of stuck physiology! Not to attack the biochemical theories—they’ve offered much we can to—but also it is too simplistic! These symptoms are indeed sensible if one uses higher mind rationale, which is easy once one relinquishes the need to make rational sense except through leaps of consciousness.

I have hopes that the incidence of some mental illnesses will lessen as people become more psychologically-minded. It is to this that I am devoting my future—one of the things.