Drama and Narration: The Architecture of Psychoanalytic Play

ABSTRACT

Beginning with a fantasy interview with Donald Winnicott and William Shakespeare – one in which Winnicott espouses the essential nature of play in psychoanalysis – he then joins Shakespeare in finding a promising set of ideas for psychoanalytic play. These ideas arise out of Shakespeare’s theatrical, play-full world of drama and narrative. Both these sets of ideas then build upon an epistemology based on an information theory of change in psychoanalytic therapy – one which asserts that change is a constant in every living system, and therefore the field of every session of therapy. Thus, in every developing psychotherapy, there becomes an emerging, often unknown “architecture” involving what is ceaselessly changing. This quality of change preserves some basis of order in any treatment (e.g. 1st Order Change). In effect, it is responsible for “keeping the system the ‘same.’” 1st Order Change involves the often unwitting “premises” upon which aspects of both the treatment narrative and drama are organized. It contrasts to a different kind of change (2nd Order Change) which radically changes some of the organizing assumptions (“premises”) of the therapy. 2nd Order Change typically emerges in an unwitting, unpredictable manner, catching both analytic participants by surprise. In other articles over the past two decades, the author has described this in terms of theory about improvisation. Optimizing the creative genius of such moments of play, requires that therapists immerse themselves in the field, in a non-presumptive “bottom-up” phenomenological experiential manner in contrast to the historical “top-down” “prejudices” that the history of theory and practice – within psychoanalysis and from without – often dictate, in terms of what becomes searched for and interpreted. Two case illustrations examine what can emerge when unwitting, unpredictable, preconscious moments of improvising emerge, with unpredictable aspects in entities such as character, narrative, script and so forth. This broad coalescence of ideas leads to the creation of moments of the “heretofore unimaginable” rather than what seems more like the expectable and predictable 1st Order Change world orders most treatments.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic play
• drama
• narration
• improvisation
• 1st and 2nd order theory of change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Both have been tremendous inspirations to the book I am writing, Psychoanalytic Play: Drama, Narration and Improvisation in Field Theory and Metapsychology. The goal of my book is to legitimize play as an actual mode of therapeutic action, available to all psychoanalysts. Doing so entails filling in what I believe has been sorely missing on the topic of psychoanalytic play. Indeed, I am arguing that there are three subjects critical to locating play at the center of psychoanalytic theory and practice, which is in the spirit of what I believe Winnicott and others have sought.

² Key to this metapsychology on psychoanalytic play, are the roles that various information/systems theories assume in its explication. For example, “dramatic repetitions” closely follow principles of general systems theory and cybernetics - especially in their “goal-directiveness” (often unwitting) and the “redundancy” captured in processes of “looping” in the intra- and interpersonal characteristics of the analytic players and their relationship. “looping” involves processes of co-created feedback loops – symptomatic of “going over and over again” some “dramatic repetition.”

³ Improvising, i.e. playing in-and-amongst the “looping” of “dramatic repetitions” can operate as “circuit breakers” disrupting particular patterns of looping. Information/systems theories that speak more closely to these spontaneous processes arise more from complexity and chaos theories in so far as both delve into the unintentional, unpredictable embeddedness in the field.

⁴ From Robert Pirzig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirzig, 1974).

⁵ The term “offer” comes from improvisational theater, in which scenes become co-created by the players without virtually any preparation. Thus, as the scene begins, each is “offering” tidbits of their character’s epistemological view of the fictive “reality” they are creating which quickly indicates who they are becoming as characters, what their relationship is, what they are doing, and where this is all taking place. The “where” is revealed by what they are enacting non-verbally as well as what they are saying in their emerging narrative.Imagine, for example, two players called up on stage and challenged to create a scene based on the theme of “conflict.” Imagine then, how playing off-of-and-with what they are saying and indicating, the scene emerges as located in an auto repair shop. In it, one of mechanics discovers “by accident” the other has a racy photograph of his girlfriend. From their confrontation their conflict becomes fully animated, explicating aspects of their characters, along with an emerging “plot” and resolution of the scene – heretofore completely unknown to one another nor the audience, as it didn’t exist before the scene commenced.Its creation relied solely on their unconscious minds playing off-of-and-with each other’s “offerings” in developing the scene. Nevertheless, whatever the actors create in the scene, also replicates somethings emerging from their respective unconscious’ insofar as none of this is prepared or predictable. This is paradigmatic of psychoanalytic therapy when it is permitted to be playful, echoing Bion’s admonition to begin every therapeutic session as if neither analyst nor patient had ever met before (Bion, 1967).

⁶ Their arising immediately bumps us up to a level of abstraction which yanks us out of the more phenomenologically direct experience of the treatment field by heightening our looking at it from our “top-down” prejudices. This happens routinely even among the most ardent clinicians who profess practicing “top-down.”

⁷ Of course, experience tells us that there can be many unpredicted consequences in venturing into imagining uncharted of “forbidden” territory of the mind. However, this shouldn’t stop us. On the contrary, it becomes a very rich means in enumerable ways for stimulating fresh, albeit frightening dialogue which might not otherwise appear.

⁸ These improvisational moments can later be reintroduced as “model scenes” (Lichtenberg et al., 1992) representative of something believed to be so constrained that it could not be possible until it actually happened. That it happened can then become a reference point in the future to not simply lapse back into some “constrained” emotional conviction. It galvanizes the possibility of pointing out how what was “heretofore impossible” became a “possibility” – it actually did occur. It begs the question, why could it not happen again?

⁹ In retrospective, the source of my “three-year old character” demanding “you promised,” was likely unconsciously playing off-of earlier sessions in which Jay told me that smoking pot served as a “promised ‘reward’” for his pathological accommodations to the world, both at work, and in his marriage, and family life.

¹⁰ This is a question I explore in the field theory section of my book including how the right and left hemispheres of the brain interdependently process the information of our experience of the field.

¹¹ What is especially meaningful about this, is that not only has Jay been able to control his addiction and remain sober, in a comparable time frame, I have had two other male patients – also in their 40’s – quit drinking and smoking marijuana. In all three cases, these were addictions they had had since adolescence. In none of them, was any form of 12 Step program or rehab required. Perhaps the most important thing is that something was occurring in the therapy that got access to a state of a true-to-self-character of readiness. An emergent state of being in the therapy, such that when they finally could begin to feel ready to stop, they finally were fully committed and able to do it in a manner that was meaningful to all three of them.

¹² It is the initial play of the caregiver and the baby that builds up on the nascent intersubjective nature that is part of “normal” development. It ultimately builds on a kind of subject-to-subject relating in the development of a predominantly intersubjective relationship

¹³ So far as I recall I never told Sami anything about how he should feel. This raises an interesting question, one Steve Mitchell often introduced, which is what might I have been unwittingly revealing non-verbally about a range of feelings I was wondering that Sami might have, or could have, or might have difficulty experiencing, and how might that be insinuated in my facial expression as an implied directive?

¹⁴ “Dr. Phil” is a television celebrity psychotherapist who, after minimal exploration of his guest-patient’s issue de jour, instantaneously dispenses the pabulum of daily advice sandwiched between commercial breaks and the show’s end credits.

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Philip Ringstrom

Philip Ringstrom, Ph.D., Psy.D., is a Senior Training and Supervising Analyst and Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, in Los Angeles, California. He is a founding member of the Board of Directors of IARPP, and a member of the International Council of Self-Psychologists. He is on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and Psychoanalysis: Self and Context. He has published over 60 articles, chapters, and reviews and has presented at conferences all over the world. His book A Relational Psychoanalytic Approach to Conjoint Therapy (Routledge, 2014) won the Goethe Award in psychoanalysis for 2014. He is currently writing a new book titled: Psychoanalytic Play: Dramatization, Narration, and Improvisation in Field Theory and Metapsychology.