- In the Dentist Office - wherein
I discover the Inner Playground: (mp3)
- The Inner Playground -
defined
- My Inner Inner City
- My Own Private Hollywood
- Part Two: Games for the Inner Player
- Freeze Tag
- Mother May I
- Simon Says
- Part Three: Building an Inner Playground
- The Inner Seesaw
- My Inner Swingset
- Part Four: Introducing Serious and Silly
- Serious and Silly (mp3)
- Kick the Can
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This is a delightful and odd little piece - an
approach to mind-expansion through the imagery of childhood play.
DeKoven, the author of books
on children’s games (and very rewardingly rich websites), has
produced a Compact Disc (CD) of a mixture of guided contemplation
and evocative reading of a description of an imagined playground,
the players being the different roles you play in life: your
inner child, your inner serious one, your imagined naughty or silly
self, and how those roles play off against your serious and conscientious
parts of yourself.
A number of psycho-philosophical issues are raised.
First, the mind is represented as pluralistic. There are a multiplicity
of parts
of you, and a division of the levels, so that there is the role
of who you think you are - what the philosopher George Herbert
Mead called "the me;" another role is the observer, the "I"
- and this role has no necessary associated qualities. Many people
have
never made this elementary division! DeKoven even suggests the
possibility of the mind thinking about the way it observes itself
- and of course this multi-level commentary is possible in the
realm of consciousness.
For example, it is theoretically possible for me to write about
the bias of a critic who notes that the director of a play has
not corrected
an actor who seemingly lost his (the actor’s) needful role-distance
and is distorting the role being played with his own personal concerns.
Besides
the different levels hinted at and sometimes identified, there
is also the suggestion of a range of parts of oneself, such
as the serious part that plays over and against the silly part,
and sometimes the two work in a complementary way, each modifying
the
other’s part, not allowing it to get too stuck or far out.
The nice and naughty roles are similarly presented in dynamic interaction.
Putting
different parts in the setting of children’s games
is a fresh, original way of considering the workings of the mind.
At times DeKoven notes that the different roles interact with no
seeming awareness that these relationships are as much of a construction,
something "made up," like games. Without belaboring the
fact, he hints at the way people "beat themselves up," and
thus only edges on the way a great deal of human constriction,
manipulation, and unhappiness are also open to analysis as forms
of competitive
or not-so-fun-producing game-like exchanges. Eric Berne, the psychiatrist
who in the 1960s wrote the best-selling book, "Games People
Play," of course did just this, and, alas, in so doing, I
think gave the whole idea of play and game a little bit of a negative
association.
DeKoven may help to reverse this.
DeKoven is more in line with the
contemporary trend towards "positive
psychology," focusing instead on helping people to develop
their strengths. In this case, His "Inner Playground" is closer
to one of
those computer software programs that lets you do some interesting
things with your computer that you didn’t know you could
do: you can discover more ways to enjoy yourself in a wholesome
fashion,
hurting no one, and develop some skills of mental flexibility as
you do this. I mentioned philosophy, because the problem of self and identity
have become more vividly a problem in this postmodern age, and
in light of postmodernist philosophers. One approach is simply
to deconstruct
the self, another is to note how the self is "saturated" with
more affiliations and identities than ever before. A third approach,
DeKoven’s, is to promote the mental skills of playing with
all of these constructs as if they were roles in a game or play – and
I think this is especially heuristic – i.e., generative of
practical applications and techniques, and implications for further
contemplation,
deepening, and philosophizing.
Finally, this is a kind of self-help instrument. I can see it being
used in a variety of settings:
- as the basis of or supplement to a workshop at a personal
development seminar or growth center, or at one of the consciousness-transformation
conferences that have become somewhat more popular in the last
decade
- as an adjunct to healing, used by psychotherapists
for their clients
- as something some people will find useful as a kind
of self-help book, or one that can be listened to during the
commute to or from
work (although the section on the inner swing or see-saw probably
shouldn’t be practiced whilde driving).
- as an adjunct to a workshop on applications of role
theory in life
- as the basis for a spiritual or philosophical study
group, considering how people may be engaging in similar game-like
transactions
with their imagined relationship with God, Jesus, or other spiritual
guiding or provoking figure.
In summary, Recess for the Soul introduces a number
of images, metaphors, that I find enchanting. It certainly
resonates with the spirit of my work, as expressed in my writings about
psychodrama and especially in my book, The
Art of Play: Helping Adults Reclaim Imagination and Spontaneity. It combines psychology and
draws
upon
developments in a growing trans-academic field, the study
of play. (This field is concerned not just with play therapy, nor
even how
play is an important part of child development, but a consideration
of the very nature of play, in adulthood, in all of culture,
and in psychology.)
reviewed by Dr.
Adam Blatner, June 23, 2005 |
