| Whisker, Craig |
Tauhara Encounter: Reflections on a Residential Psychodrama Group Session (PDF, 129.8 KB) |
Journal 31 December 2022 |
audience, auxiliary, auxiliary ego, creativity, director, doubling, encounter, mirroring, Moreno, production, protagonist, Psychodrama, psychotherapy, reflections, relationship, role, role reversal, sharing, spontaneity, tele, warm up |
Since 2013 I have co-led with either Marian Hammond or Selina Reid, and have twice led by myself, an annual winter residential psychodrama retreat at the Tauhara Retreat Centre located above Acacia Bay on Taupō-nui-a-Tia, Lake Taupō near the centre of Te Ika-o-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. On each occasion I write copious notes describing workshop sessions and my initial analyses and reflections on them and I jot down insights from between-session or end-of-day discussions with my co-leader. The process of writing while memories and impressions are still fresh captures what in days, even hours, may be unrecoverable. When I warm up to re-entering the stream of consciousness I had during the session I often perceive more than I did when in the group. These are unpolished perceptions. They include wonderings or conflicts that I form into questions or pose as contrasting points of view and they sometimes cause fragments of associative thought to surface from deep within my psyche, or a new perspective to suddenly appear like the bright green tip of a spring bud. |
8 |
2022-12 |
|
Enlivening the Psychodramatist as Writer (PDF, 79.5 KB) |
Journal 20 December 2011 |
production, spontaneity training, writers, writing |
There is a wide roaming pack of existential fools, mavericks and strangers in strange lands. Some are writers. Some are great. The great writers have achieved a working practice of spontaneity, purpose and craft. They are alchemists working with the exhilarating power of production. They engage readers as active participants in the emerging human experience, not explaining things but crafting them in a way that the reader can experience them. Their works and their lives lived are treasures for the apprentice writer. This paper presents some of these treasures. It is designed for the psychodrama enthusiast who has been keen to bring the life of the stage to the page. |
11 |
2011-12 |
