| Social Therapy |
Social therapy is a practical, non-diagnostic and non-interpretive, short-term method for helping people to re-initiate their emotional development through performance. By using performance, the social therapeutic approach challenges the assumptions of knowledge-based, problem-oriented, anti-developmental psychology including most forms of psychotherapy.
Over the last 25 years of practice we have discovered that development is the cure for emotional pain and psychopathology. And, contrary to conventional psychological wisdom, we have seen that there are no natural limits to human development.
By performance we mean the uniquely human activity of going beyond yourself; being someone other than who you are; creating who you are by being who you are not.
Picture the tragically common scene of a man storming around the house in a rage about to hit his wife. That man is unself-consciously acting out the role of an abusive husband, which he has acquired in learning how to behave like a man.
Crucial to his learned role is the assumption that when he is angry or upset he has no choice but to hit her. However, through social therapy he can learn that he does have a choice. He has the capacity to perform as who he is not. For example, in the moment he is about to hit his wife he could tell a joke, or sing a song instead — or he could ham it up in the style of the late comedian Jackie Gleason, as Ralph Kramden: "One of these days, Alice...Pow! Right in the kisser!" Or, he could take his wife's hand and smile at her. In doing one of these things (or any other performance) he can change the form of his anger — and of his life.
Every human being has this remarkable capacity to perform. For example, babies babble long before they know how to speak, or even know that there is such a thing as speaking. Adults and older children respond to the funny noises the little ones make not by judging how they do it and not insisting that they be quiet until they can do it right.
It is not a "problem" that these inexperienced speakers have a very limited vocabulary or that they make grammatical mistakes. Babies babble, we talk back to them, they imitate the sounds we make — not like the mimicry of parrots and monkeys, but creatively — and before we know it they are speaking. The "social" part in other words, human beings develop as speakers by participating in a social ensemble whose members create a performance of speaking together. If very young children were not supported to perform in this way, none of us would ever make the developmental leap from baby talk to the real thing.
Early on, however, most of us are discouraged from performing; we are only allowed to be who we already are, as societally defined. Children of four or five, or even younger, are told (or warned) to "behave" — that is, to stop performing and do what the societal roles and rules require. There is nothing wrong with societal rules and roles; behavior — the infinite number of acts that get you through the day without your having to give them much thought — may be quite convenient and efficient for mailing a letter or buying groceries. But precisely because it is unself-conscious and unthinking, behavior can be enormously painful, stifling or non-developmental when it comes to being intimate with someone you love, or dealing with physical pain and illness, or handling a crisis.
This is where performance comes in. In contrast to behavior, performance is creative and self-conscious; it is how people create choices as to who, and how, they want to be. And it turns out that performance, which is how development is initiated in the first place, is how adults can continuously create their development throughout life. The social therapy group is a performatory environment in which people are supported to create new emotional forms of life.
The social therapist does not possess the true interpretation or explanation of why a client feels the way he or she feels, or does what he or she does — an underlying truth which the client must come to understand in order to solve the problem. The social therapist is more like a theater director who helps the client to create, along with other people, new performances of affection, anger, anxiety, depression, desire, excitement, grief, happiness, humiliation, impotence, panic — new forms of emotional life. This is how performance enables people to give expression to the choices that they make and at the same time to see that they are capable of making choices. It is this self-conscious activity of continuously performing who and how you are in the world which is what we mean by development — and how development is the cure.
Social therapy has been strongly influenced by the writing of Lev Vygotsky, the acclaimed Soviet psychologist of the 1920s and 1930s who described early child development as emerging social-cultural-historical activity. His descriptions of the reciprocal processes of creative imitation and completion that that go on in the language learning environment created by young children and their caregivers have been invaluable for our work.
Social therapists help adults to create developmental environments where they can not just use language in well practiced ways, but make new meanings through performing creative imitation and completion. Equally influential are the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, considered by many to be the most significant philosopher of the 20th Century. Wittgenstein believed passionately that that how we use and understand language (especially language about subjective experience such as feelings, thoughts and beliefs) is a source of our pathology. His philosophical enterprise was therapeutic in the sense that he aimed to free us of the pictures that "hold us captive," the confusions and muddles we get into because we are always trying to explain things that do not need explaining. Both Vygotsky and Wittgenstein have contributed significantly to our recognition that it is necessary to understand language and meaning — not as corresponding to reality, not as "being about" anything, but as human social activity.
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