Dramatherapy i - thresholds, liminality and wounded healers

Individual

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      INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC  --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

 SOCIOLOGY  :    POLITICAL 

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Group

A personal journey The 'wounded healer' - Halifax (1982) ".. it is the experience of our own wounding that will enable us to engage with our clients in a healing process". p.15.

"Therefore we can begin to understand that rather than the drama being the chaos, the drama is both the container of the chaos and the means of exploring it. Accompanying our groups through such dangerous territory may seem too frightening for the dramatherapist to contemplate, let alone the client". p.15.

"The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (threshold people) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these people elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate places and position in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there: they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial. As such their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualise social and cultural transitions. This liminality is likened frequently to - death, being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness and to an eclipse of the sun or the moon". p.14.

"The 'illness/treatment' model has by its nature to emphasise what the patient cannot do rather than what he might be able to do; to emphasise that what requires to be done is carried out by others rather than what the patient might do for him/herself". p.262. Power as exercised (degrees of freedom?) through the therapeutic turn: the history of therapies; social, industrial, occupational, physical, drama, psychotherapy et al. ...

Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process. Structure and Anti-Structure. Routledge, London. cited in Jennings, S. (1987) Dramatherapy and Groups, Chap. 1. pp.1-18. In Jennings, S. (Ed.), (1987) Dramatherapy. Theory and Practice for Teachers and Clinicians. Routledge, London. p.14.

Mitchell, R. (1987) Dramatherapy in In-patient Psychiatric Settings, Chap. 12. pp.257-276. In Jennings, S. (Ed.), (1987) Dramatherapy. Theory and Practice for Teachers and Clinicians. Routledge, London. p.14.

In theoretical terms, Mitchell also describes the creative model, the learning model and the therapeutic model (p.265).

Halifax, J. (1982) Shaman: the wounded healer. Thames and Hudson, London [England].

Previously: theatre , threshold , liminal