30 Oct Activity and Performance (and their Discourses) in Social Therapeutic Method
October 30, 2010
I recently finished a revision of a chapter on social therapy, by Fred Newman and me, for a book being put together by Tom Strong (University of Calgary) and Andy Lock (Massey University), two long-time postmodern colleagues of ours. The book, Discursvie Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice, is scheduled for publication sometime in 2011 by Oxford University Press. Here’s a little taste…
Social therapy is the social-cultural-historical activity of groupings of people collectively creating environments in which they can and do perform therapy. They create both the environment and the performance simultaneously. Therapeutic talk, in social therapy as in all discursive therapies, begins as individuals telling their stories. The work of social therapy is to transform the culturally and institutionally overdetermined psychological and truth-referential environment-and-talk into a “theatre without a stage” upon which the therapy group, qua group, creates a play (in this case, their therapy play).
Why? Because we are interested in human development and engage in activities that we believe help people to grow and transform qualitatively. Theatre and therapy can be developmental/transformative because both are opportunities for people to experience life in new ways, in ways other than those we have been socialized to—i.e., without a problem-solution or conflict resolution paradigm, but rather seeing life’s uncertainty and unknowability.
To read Activity and Performance…
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