Dismantling violent forms of masculinity through developmental transformations

Abstract

Violent forms of masculinity have profound and negative influences upon child development, social institutions, and the cultural environment at large. Childhood abuse, domestic violence, crime, imprisonment, and domination in all its appearances are closely linked to violent acts committed by men or in the name of masculinity. In addition to treating victims of such violence, health professionals must develop effective means of treating the perpetrators of violence. Therefore, the creative arts therapies must articulate conceptual and methodological strategies toward this end, based presumably on the antithetical relationship between art and play, on the one hand, and violence and hatred, on the other. This article is an exploration of the possible moral influences of one form of drama therapy upon violent forms of masculinity. Developmental Transformations is a method of drama therapy that is based on the concept of the “playspace,” in which therapist and client agree to play together in the world of the imagination (Johnson, 1991; Johnson, Forrester, Dintino, James, & Schnee, 1996). The playspace is a condition where cause and effect are represented, not actualized, where the consequences of one’s actions are suffered in pretend, not reality. The playspace is considered to be therapeutic because it involves the embodied enactment of imagined possibilities in relationship to the actions and presences of others and the experiencing of imagined consequences. Because of space constraints, no further explanation of Developmental Transformations will be provided in this paper, but readers not familiar with this method of drama therapy are referred to Johnson (1991; 2000) and Johnson et al. (1996). The playspace in Developmental Transformations may be an ideal therapeutic laboratory for change to occur because the playspace’s “embodied encounter” involves an interaction between subjective and objective experiences of the body. The therapist in Developmental Transformations models the body as both object and agent, offering him or herself as a “playobject” for clients, sometimes being an object of the clients’ actions, other times initiating actions, interpretations, resistance, and transformations (Johnson et al., 1996). The fact that participants in the playspace are agents and objects within an imaginative world heightens the awareness that they are choosing their actions and the meaning of those actions from multiple possibilities in each moment. The playspace is a “moral space” because of the constraint against harm that is inherent in playing within the imaginal realm as opposed to acting out in reality (Johnson, 1998). It may be that a male client with a history of violence who actively represents acts of violence within the imaginative conditions of the playspace will experience less of an impulse to commit acts of violence in the real world outside of the playspace. If so, then the therapeutic playspace may offer a way to reduce men’s violent behavior.