(And why does that matter?)
My approach to play therapy, what I call the Reciprocal, or the Neurotype Affirming, model, encourages the adult to enter the play room as if they were facilitating an artist’s workshop, in which they had responsibility for their own enjoyment as well as the child’s. This post looks at what the adult might get out of it.
Why does an artist collaborate? Perhaps we can say it is one of two reasons. Either to produce work that requires the skills of another artist and/or to go into process with another person, making work that comes out of their way of being/experiencing in combination with one‘s own.
What is the arachnean? The arachnean is a way of being, in which planning, strategy and gaining ideas are not relevant. It is immediate, and it is free flowing. It is an archetype, a mask, than many people can occupy occasionally. It bears some relationship to a flow state. The spider weaving its web has no plan, in the way that most human projects have a plan. And yet something strong, beautiful and functional emerges. The arachnean in all of us is this web weaving spider. It requires a context — a spider needs a nook to weave a web — on a plane of glass a spider flails. Many non-speaking children who we call autistic occupy the arachnean mode most of the time.
The artist longs for the arachnean mode. and so by being in relation to the arachnean in the other they have the opportunity to awaken the arachnean in themselves. Only the opportunity, mind you. If they take a hierarchical or oppositional relationship to the child they may stifle the arachnean in themselves — this is the unacknowledged function of the traditional therapist client relationship. The therapist, by helping to quiet the arachnean (or burn the witch, defeat the troll or slay the dragon) makes themselves the anti-monster — and locks up for themselves and for society the inconvenient or frightening parts of human nature. But the artist, in this model, comes to play with the one who is comfortable embodying the arachnean. And in doing so they play with the arachnean in themselves. The selfish motivation is necessary to avoid othering, to avoid hierarchy.
And so, in this mode, the artist comes to collaborate with someone who, because of their way of being in the world, what we can call their autism, perhaps, or their silence, someone who has different relationships with the archetypical forces that make up the transpersonal human being. It is a journey into the forest.
Now, I don‘t want to exoticise autism or disability or anyone. Each of us has access to a unique set of archetypes, which is why collaboration and friendship are so rewarding. And there is something specific about being someone who doesn‘t speak — also being someone called autistic. I can‘t say exactly what that is. There are some features which make the non-hierarchical approach aspirational and imperfect here. I’ll look at these in a subsequent post.