Masters of their Conditions III: Clinical applications of theater anthropology in cultural psychiatry

Jacques Arpin

doi:10.1177/1363461512443527

Abstract

Body learning gives actors basic structures and references that enable them to codify their actions in a script or score. With this score, acquired through training, performing and transmitting, actors who work with theater anthropology methodology offer strategies and tools that healers can use with their patients. This actor’s score has inspired a mode of working with patients both to understand the case history and guide the course of therapy. In this approach, patients are like authors who want to act out their dramaturgy, but who need a director-healer to organize the story and help them build their healing process. Together, patient and therapist work on stage to advance the treatment, at the same time enhancing their strategies and methods for collaboration.

Highlights

Enactment, performance, psychotherapy, theatre anthropology. This is the third paper in a series describing the Masters of their Conditions project which aims to build bridges between medicine and the performing arts, between cultural psychiatry and theater anthropology
“Masters of their Conditions” (Arpin, 2003) examined cultural and clinical identity as a matter of performance, in which the performing body is the result of a series of apprenticeships that involve cultural transmission that leads to mastery
“Masters of their Conditions II” (Arpin, 2008) asked what lessons we can learn from traditions that do not separate theater and performance studies from medicine

Summary

Introduction

This is the third paper in a series describing the Masters of their Conditions project which aims to build bridges between medicine and the performing arts, between cultural psychiatry and theater anthropology. Bringing patients and healers together on a stage in the clinical setting and using all forms of text and performance allows for another way of (re)constructing case histories. I have found inspiration in the work of actors who can explore a character’s body and transmit emotions, information, insights, and even solutions to the very problems we learn about in first sessions with patients.

Results

Conclusion