Deadly Therapy

Therapists have a lot to learn from theater professionals about helping people narrate important conflicts, understand uplifting ideas, and engage in illuminating interactions. Analysis of theater has also produced Goffman's dramaturgical vision of reality, in which people are beset with performance problems including defining situations, forming teams, casting roles, and managing discrediting information. A dramaturgical understanding of psychotherapy is articulated in this book, with a focus on living up to situational norms intrinsic to therapy and managing performance failures associated with the roles of therapist and patient. Norms derive from rules and categories—in society and in therapy—that help people know how to behave, but which also produce self-serving hegemonies of privilege and power, even in therapy. Performance theory—encompassing audience engagement, dramaturgy, gender studies, power and privilege dynamics, critical thinking, and multiculturalism—is used to investigate the "party lines" that get established in therapy and supervision, and to suggest ways to temper the deadening effects of rules and categories.

Deadly Therapy explores the implications of a dramaturgical approach to the therapy encounter and uses lessons from the theater to illustrate how to enliven psychotherapy. Every psychotherapy is an interpersonal system in which power and privilege lead to self-serving rules and categories that marginalize aspects of the system that are out of step with the _party line._ Performance theory—encompassing audience engagement, dramaturgy, gender studies, power and privilege dynamics, critical thinking, and multiculturalism—has much to teach about subverting party lines and empowering the stigmatized and voiceless aspects of therapy and supervisory systems.

Michael Karson, Ph.D., J.D., is clinical associate professor at the University of Denver's Graduate School of Professional Psychology. Prior to that he practiced psychotherapy and consulted in the child welfare system for 25 years in Massachusetts. He is the author of Using Early Memories in Psychotherapy: Roadmaps to Presenting Problems and Treatment Impasses, Patterns of Child Abuse: How Dysfunctional Transactions are Replicated in Individuals, Families and the Child Welfare System and the senior author of 16PF Interpretation in Clinical Practice: A Guide to the Fifth Edition.