The Studio/Spielraum//Artist/Arachnean experiment has radical implications.
Almost all therapy is hierarchical, and certainly therapy for children.
Let’s think about therapy for adults now, and I want to explore the idea that the hierarchy takes at least two archetypal forms. Let’s play with a binary pair here.
We can think of them as masculine and feminine for the sake of simplicity – though it should go without saying that this does not imply men or women in the therapeutic roles. We have the masculine control of the Psychiatrist archetype as seen in the plays of Joe Orton and Pinter’s Hothouse. It is an archetype rooted in the Victorian penal system (which never ended), in which those whose way of being in the world is seen as a threat, are neutralised through drugs, imprisonment or reeducation. As we lock up people who inhabit masks, roles, ways of being, that frighten us, we lock away the parts of ourselves that are most frightening. We say, yes, it’s human I suppose, but not today thank you, not in this civilisation, and certainly not me, in this human here. Very reassuring to play a Psychiatrist, the judge in this system, for in that role they are the opposite of mad, and have their sanity validated every day.
The female archetype is more like the nurse. Think of the counsellor here, the art and play therapist maybe. Another form of this archetype is the Madonna. How appealing to be the all giving mother with no needs or desires of their own – for then one need not reckon with oneself, one’s hatreds and despair, losses and longings. One lives to care for the other, the everyman Jesus, and sex is out of the question too – dealt with by that whore, reformed (but not really, come on lads, we’re not buying that), the other Mary, Magdalene.
The play therapist is like Mary Mother of God. Which is reassuring to all concerned. And everyone is glad to be free of the horrible prison-warden psychiatrist. But this Madonna equally limits the humanity of therapist and child. And it leaves open only the possibility of a stunted form of play. The wheels on the bus go round and round and round and round and round.
What we wish to do is to introduce into what would be called the therapy space a dynamic that avoids these two archetypal hierarchies. Of course the child would be fully looked after, kept safe, taken care of.
Beyond that we do not ask the adult — now artist- facilitator rather than therapist — to take on any false roles apart from the one they are genuinely moved to take on. They can follow curiosity. Play can travel in more complicated directions.
One example from my work with Esther: I was having a bad day and the last thing I wanted to do was to lead a playroom session. I did not want to bring that resentment into the room with me, and yet, play is inauthentic and clunky if something is being masked. How, then, to offer a session, a play therapy session, with this resentment. My approach was to find forms, characters, that could play into this emotion. I took the role of a prowling tiger in an imaginative game and proposed higher energy exercise. It was one of the most successful play sessions we had because Esther responded to my authentic energy, which, though based outside the room in frustration, inside the room became excellent and safe fuel for play. Far safer than bottling emotion up. We all have memories of that teacher at school who was suppressing a daily torment — such a suppression is much worse in a play therapy context.
But just to say to an artist ‘enjoy it’ isn’t structurally sound enough to rely on. Many therapists do this anyway. But for a structural shift I think there must be an outcome for the artist. The frame, then, of the session includes an expectation that this is playful research for some kind of artistic output.
In this way the artist is under no illusion that the session is some kind of drudgery that they must get through. And we don’t need to rely on people who are motivated to be Play Therapists so that they can occupy one of the two hierarchical archetypes – Madonna or (less likely) Prison Warden.
To be clear, the Madonna Spieltherapeut is not a bad therapist. But a) many children will not respond to that, we need to explore other options; b) they are likely to be bringing neurotypical attitudes to play; c) there is a (therapeutic) power in the playfulness of someone who comes for selfish reasons that I am interested in tapping into.