A journey with an abused child : a non-directive play therapy perspective

The extensive amount of research conducted in the field of family violence internationally indicates that child abuse has a detrimental effect on both the physical and emotional development of children as well as having a profound effect on an individual’s psychological development and functioning in adult life. The aim of this research study was to describe the therapeutic process that unfolded with a seven year old allegedly abused female client within the framework of non-directive play therapy. The case was further contextualised utilising Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development. This study served to broaden the body of psychotherapeutic knowledge by means of meaningful qualitative enquiry. The client was referred for therapy because of severe emotional and behavioural problems following the alleged sexual abuse. The client was seen over a period of eight months and this included 11 sessions of non-directive play therapy, three parent interviews and psychometric assessments conducted by a colleague. The case study method was utilised in this study. To achieve the aim of the research, the methodology of choice was the descriptive dialogic case study. A purposive sampling technique was used in the selection of the research subject for this study. The data collection and analysis were conducted according to Yin’s (1994) analytical generalisation, which consists of two main strategies: (a) using a theoretical framework as a guide to determine what data is relevant; and (b) developing a matrix as a descriptive framework for organising and integrating the data. Furthermore, the process of data analysis was aided by the use of guidelines proposed by Irving Alexander (1988) with Axline’s non-directive play therapy and Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development as the theoretical frameworks. The findings of this study suggest that plotting the play therapy sessions according to the framework of the four stages of play therapy was a particularly useful tool to monitor Michelle’s progression through the therapeutic process. This can be seen as a valuable application of a tool which can be used within the non-directive play therapy approach. Contextualising Michelle’s development according to the stages of Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development was also found to be a valuable endeavour. According to her chronological age, Michelle should have been in the fourth stage of industry versus inferiority, but in reality Michelle was still struggling to strike a healthy balance between the terms of conflict of trust versus mistrust issues of the first stage. From a therapeutic point, this was an important exercise as it helped to inform the therapist and consequently, the therapeutic process. This research undertaking can be recognised as a positive demonstration of the value of non-directive play therapy (Virginia Axline) and Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development in the therapeutic process. In addition, this study has served to facilitate a more holistic understanding of the case study approach to research. Recommendations regarding future research undertakings that utilise the case study approach and methodology have been made. Key concepts: child abuse; family violence; non-directive play therapy; Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development; analytical generalisation; case study research

The Sentient Stage: The Theatrical Uncanny in Contemporary Performance

This dissertation identifies and explores a genre of performance I term the “theatrical uncanny.” Intermingling aesthetics and psychology, the uncanny is the realm of “intellectual uncertainty” (for Ernst Jentsch) and “the familiar made strange” (for Sigmund Freud); it is an obscure but palpable disruption of our expectations. The genre of the uncanny has received a great deal of scholarly attention in both film and literature, but has, by contrast, been minimally explored in performance. This neglect is particularly striking considering theatre itself can be viewed as inherently uncanny. The repetitions and representations of performance, its interdependence of the real and the imaginary, imply a kind of ever-present déjà vu. The very pervasiveness of this quality can in fact render it insensible. The genre of uncanny performance is therefore a valuable designation for works that actively elicit this psycho-emotional response. The productions I study are remarkable for their ability to capitalize on theatre’s uncanny potential. I demonstrate that this category of performance is not limited to any particular style or status, locating the effect as potently in popular entertainments (such as the junk opera Shockheaded Peter and punchdrunk’s Sleep No More) as in more esoteric or avant-garde work (like that of artists such as the Quay Brothers and Tadeusz Kantor). Drawing on a variety of methods – including phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science – I engage with these performances as sensual experience. Through subjective impression and extensive description, I gradually elucidate the scenographic parameters of the theatrical uncanny. The productions that achieve this effect, while greatly disparate in nature, share certain approaches and techniques in common. They position the spectator (physically, emotionally, perceptually) in an unstable relationship to the objects and bodies of the performance, creating the sensation that the inanimate actually possesses its own unique vitality. Uncanny performance interweaves elements of object theatre, memory theatre, and intermediality, but cannot be encompassed by any of these terms in isolation. These performances question our basic qualifications for declaring something ‘live,’ as the term is used both theoretically and colloquially. They ask what it would mean for a memory to behave as an object, or for an object to have memories. This study is both a critique of how the uncanny works on stage and an attempt to rethink the concept of the uncanny through theatre practice. I argue that the uncanny is best understood as an embodied experience, a feeling mediated through and registered within our flesh. It results from unsettling interactions between our bodies and the matter and space around us. The concrete and present spatial relationships of theatre are ideal for exploring these tensions. Through the materiality of theatre, I offer evidence that the uncanny response, rather than being a marginal or naïve interpretation of the world (as it is sometimes portrayed), is actually a fundamental and profoundly productive state of mind

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters\u27 walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the purposes of art and often display their sculptures in ways that are self-reflexive of speciesism and express criticisms of anthropocentrism. Through an intersectional feminist lens and alongside critical insights from (and debates within) postcolonialism, deconstruction, and affect theory, I analyze the art pieces created by Sarina Brewer, Angela Singer, Polly Morgan, Scott Bibus, and Robert Marbury. In doing so, I explore the ethical ambiguities of using postmortem animal bodies in an art movement that is informed by animal rights, and also discuss the complexity of animal-human relationships in the face of human conceptualized impressions of life and death. Brushing up against the history of public autopsies and other forms of body preservation, I look to the ways in which bodies are made ‘taxidermic’ through violence, trauma, objectification, commodification, bio-engineered artificiality, extinction, and the discriminatory practices that represented certain (animal and human) bodies as ‘unruly.’ Tackling the frames that produce ‘taxidermic’ bodies (as exposable and exploitable skins), I challenge the anthropocentrism foundational to human thought and highlight the ways that humans produce and perpetuate hollowed out crypts of meaning as it applies to animality. Essentially, this project attempts to undermine anthropocentric worldviews that construct humans as separate and unique from what is understood and described as the ‘nonhuman,’ and, also, invites readers to confront and acknowledge how vulnerability and mortality are shared among humans (animals) and other nonhuman beings