Dramatherapy with Children and Adolescents

Sue Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317799122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Drama plays a crucial role in healthy human development and dramatherapy can be particularly effective in helping troubled children or adolescents. In this book, twelve contributors, writing from a range of international and theoretical perspectives, show how the dramatic element in people's lives plays its part in patterns of healthy and unhealthy development. They describe practical ways of using dramatherapy with both groups and individuals and demonstrate that dramatherapy is a strategy that works, helping to bring about change and creativity.
Dramatherapy with Children and Adolescents will be invaluable to all professionals who work with children, including social workers, probation officers, nurses and teachers, as well as dramatherapists and play therapists.

Part I

The play of young children

Chapter 1

The dramatic world view

Reflections on the roles taken and played by young children

Robert J. Landy

INTRODUCTION

During a thunderstorm late at night, Georgie, age 4, woke up and cried. She was frightened by the noise and the flashes of lightning. Her brother, Mackey, age 2, slept through it all. In the morning, the two spoke:

Georgie:	Mack, are you afraid of storms?
Mackey:	Yes.
Georgie:	But you didn’t wake up last night.
Mackey:	I wasn’t outside.

Overhearing the conversation, I thought of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland and through the looking glass (see Green 1965) where logic is turned on its head. Or, perhaps more apt, a different logic is at work. Alice’s fictional adventures are reflective of the world view of many young children, whose sense of reality is quite different from that of grown-ups. Although I eschew Lewis Carroll’s romantic conception of childhood, I agree with him that the early years in one’s life are highly dramatic and imaginative. I also believe that one way of understanding early childhood development is to accept the unique logic of children on its own terms. As one who conceptualizes personality as a system of interrelated roles and social life as an interplay of character types, I offer a dramatic conception of childhood.

The dramatic world view implies that:

1 In everyday life, as in drama/theatre, persons or actors take on and play out personae or roles in order to express a sense of who they are and what they want. Role-taking is an imaginative process of identifying with a role-model and internalizing several of its qualities. For example, if I see my father as a victim, I might take on his propensity to feel victimized and begin to view myself as a victim. Role-playing is an external process of enactment where, for example, I enact the role of victim in relation to some real or imagined victimizer in my life.

2 Each role taken or played represents one part of the person, rather than a total personality.

3 There is a paradoxical relationship between an actor and a role, a person and a persona (Landy 1993). When an actor, such as Vivien Leigh, takes on a role, such as Scarlett O’Hara, she is both herself (Leigh) and not herself (Scarlett) at the same time. In a like manner, a child playing doctor is both the child (not doctor) and the doctor (not child) at the same time.

4 When in balance, the relationship and tension between actor and role promotes creativity, spontaneity, and healthy development. When the actor is too merged with a role or too distant from a role, a sense of confusion as to one’s identity subsists.

5 Roles exist in relationship to one another. Each one taken or played often implies the possibility of the role not taken. Thus, each time one chooses (or is chosen) to be a victim, the possibility also exists of becoming a victor (survivor) or victimizer.

6 People make sense of themselves (and others) by taking on and playing out roles and communicating that sense to others through stories. Each story contains views of individual people or generalized groups of people as told from the perspective of a particular storyteller.

This chapter, applying the dramatic world view, attempts to examine primarily the early development of roles. The cast of characters to be explored is small, including the two introduced at the beginning, Georgie and Mackey, my children.

To allow myself the appropriate aesthetic distance, I needed to confront certain methodological problems. Certainly my objectivity would be impaired. Unlike Piaget, who formulated some of his developmental theory through observation of his children, I was studying my children in a non-scientific way. I engage with my children in an often random, imaginative fashion, telling stories and playing roles with them as a way of building my sense of father and of participant observer. My years of notes do not add up to a scientific understanding of role-development. They read more like a diary written by a novelist or poet or painter, noting striking observations about phenomena. (For an application of such an approach, see Hillman 1983.)

Furthermore, as I was taking notes, I was in the process of developing observational criteria regarding role-taking and role-playing, a process that is still developing. I still raise the same questions that I asked four years ago: is it possible to know when one has taken on a role? What is the relationship between role-taking and role-playing? Although one can see a role as it is played, how does one know what to call it? What do we call, for example, the 4-year-old who is afraid of storms – the fearful one? the coward? Is there some system of roles or role-types to refer to? When observing role-play, what aspects does one need to look at? And on a larger, philosophical plane, where do roles come from? Are they inherited? taken on from the social world? generated through an individual creative act?

These and many related questions guided my research process for the past several years. My methodology is, in many ways, a work in progress. As such, I cannot claim that my findings are either reliable or generalizable in a scientific sense. Their value will lie in their uncovering of individual moments that, if well described and substantiated, touch on a more universal experience. This is the method of art.

My research findings also added to a theoretical understanding of role-development. In an earlier publication (Landy 1993), I devised a system of understanding role in terms of role-type or universal form, similar to Jung’s notion of archetype; role-quality or descriptive aspects of role; role-function or the reason that one plays a role; and style of role-playing, or degree of affect and cognition, verisimilitude and abstraction. Also, I devised a taxonomy of roles identifying and categorizing role-types that subsist throughout theatre history and in everyday life. The taxonomy includes eighty-four role-types organized into six domains: somatic, cognitive, affective, social, spiritual, and aesthetic.

In looking at the early development of roles, reference will be made to these recent conceptual findings. My primary approach, however, will be anecdotal and interpretive. As such, I offer a number of stories about Georgie and Mackey and examples of their expressive activities, both visual and verbal. This information should provide a view of how and when roles are taken on and played out. I offer a way of knowing about roles that is quite different from the cognitive schemes presented by Piaget and his colleagues. This is a dramatic method, a story method, a way of knowing through telling. It differs from a more scientific method not in its rigour and intention, but in its vision of who we are as human beings and how we make sense of our existence.

GEORGIE

As early as 1 year old, Georgie was eager for stories. She would ask that each story told by her mother or father be repeated endlessly. By 2, she would do the same, although she preferred that they read picture books to her. Georgie was a wonderful audience to their stories but would rarely venture out into the storyteller role herself. At least, that’s how it appeared to her parents.

The other side of her social reticence was the fact that she seemed to have a rich imaginative life. By 1, she would gather her stuffed animals and other soft objects and arrange them in various pleasing tableaux. They would appear to be audience to her storyteller role. In that role she would talk to them at length in an apparently nonsensical, sing-song fashion. Even though she was unwilling to ‘perform’ for parents and friends, she had nonetheless taken on the role of storyteller as a 1-year-old and practised it within her arranged world.

Georgie told her stories in many ways – by ‘speaking’ to her dolls; by setting up tableaux, which in themselves embodied a story; and, as she became older, pushing 3, by drawing pictures. Her pictures revealed a complex narrative that often helped her make sense of real or imaginary experiences.

For example, at 3, Georgie drew a picture which she characterized as a faraway place where people are different. She noted the following characters in the picture: two gypsies, a bride and groom, a baby, and a faraway house.

This picture was quite clear to both her parents as it depicted not only several basic role-types that Georgie took on at an early age, but also a significant experience in her young life. When Georgie was 8 months old, she and her parents moved to Portugal for half a year, where her father was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Lisbon. The experience of being in a foreign culture where babies are treated reverently and playfully by nearly everyone, including passers-by on the street, left a strong impression upon Georgie. To be a baby meant to be unconditionally lovable and desirable. Even though her actual memory of Portugal was limited, she continued to look at photographs and request ‘Olà stories’, tales of her adventures in a faraway land where babies rule the roost, the sun always shines, and playground and beach are a five-minute jaunt from the apartment.

Each day out, whether to the city, the beach, or the market, the family would see gypsies and Georgie’s attention was often drawn to them. The gypsies were pariah figures who looked and behaved differently from the others. Some dressed flamboyantly and exuded an air of fierce independence and sensuality. Sometimes the gypsy women were beggars and would be dressed in rags and would carry babies who appeared equally ragged and desperate. Other times, they would coach their young children, like the Peachums in The Threepenny Opera, to look pathetic and beg for small change. There were many rumours, told everywhere, of how the gypsies would intentionally maim their children so they would appear even more pitiful on the streets. Georgie’s parents were used to aggressive homeless people on the streets of New York, but this was more exotic, more primal. Who were these people and where did they come from? What dark rituals did they practise? Were they actors wearing elaborate disguises or were they simply as they appeared – poor, oppressed outcasts whom no one really wanted. Did they choose to be pariahs or did others cast them in this role?

At 8 months Georgie was, of course, oblivious of these questions. But she was well attuned to her parents’ reactions to this faraway culture. She came to know gypsies through her parents’ eyes. In many ways her parents were gauging their own sense of rootlessness, alienation, and strangeness through their attention to the gypsies. So, too, were they weighing their own sense as parents who needed to guard against any impulse to use or abuse their children. They were wrestling with two images of parents and children – the first, observed in this faraway culture, unconditionally loving parents exceedingly attentive to their radiant children; the second, the distant or absent father and pariah-like mother, imposing an attitude of mendacity upon their oppressed children.

It was curious that Georgie drew two gypsies. When asked why, she had no explanation. Maybe they were mother and child, as they so often appeared on the streets. Maybe they were simply another variation on mother and father, a prominent theme in Georgie’s drawings at 3 years old.

Where did Georgie’s sense of gypsies come from? There were no photographs of gypsies at home nor did her parents speak of them in the house. At 3, it was hard to imagine that Georgie remembered seeing them or hearing talk about them when she was barely 1. Could it be that Georgie had internalized a gypsy role? If this were so, it might not be based on her memory of actual gypsies but on the part of her parents that identified with the rootlessness and romance of the gypsies.

The fact that gypsies appear in Georgie’s picture of a faraway place is significant. It could be that each expressive act of a child embodies one or more roles. We can assume that the gypsy role is taken on by Georgie from an early cultural experience as filtered through the experience of her parents. If this is so, then Georgie will have available certain gypsy qualities, as mentioned above. She may enact this role for a number of purposes, e.g. to express her sense of romance and passion (in fact, since the age of 2 she has taken great pleasure in dressing up or dressing up her dolls, and in dancing with abandon) and to express her own sense of disconnection or defiance of the conventional order (which she has done frequently since the age of 2 and which has been noted by both parents as an ongoing issue). The latter qualities are characterized in the taxonomy of roles as aspects of the pariah who is assigned to the fringes of society and functions as a challenge to the established order, a reminder that all is not well (see Landy 1993).

From her parents, Georgie may have internalized two images of herself: as a gypsy street child, conditionally lovable, based upon her ability to please her mother, and as Olà baby, a child of the sunny side of Portugal where all babies are unconditionally lovable.

Th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The play of young children
• Part II The context of dramatherapy work
• Part III Dramatherapy with adolescents
• Part III Developmental framework
• Name index
• Subject index