What the Chair Could Have Told Clint
(From a widely circulated, uncopyrighted email)
What the Chair Could Have Told Clint
By
JONATHAN D. MORENO
MANY found Clint Eastwood˙s speech at the Republican National Convention odd, but I found it oddly familiar. When Mr. Eastwood set up a chair next to the podium and used it in an imaginary dialogue with the president, I recognized it as a technique from psychodrama, the psychotherapy my father, the psychiatrist J. L. Moreno, started developing nearly 100 years ago.
Therapists often use the "empty chair" as a way of orienting a patient
to a particular relationship. "Here's your mom,ˇ they might say. "What
would you say to her if she were here, right now?ˇ The empty chair
can be a very powerful warm-up to a problematic situation, a way of
concretizing dormant, suppressed or abstract emotions in an important or
troubling relationship. Used properly, it can lead to insight.
It makes sense that Mr. Eastwood, who is an actor and director, would
come up with the idea of using the empty chair as a device in his
speech. Like many other psychodrama techniques, the empty chair has also
been used in training actors to feel themselves in their roles. Some of
my father˙s techniques have been compared to those of the famous acting
teacher Constantin Stanislavsky and his method acting school, which
has had an especially great influence on the American theater.
However, from the therapeutic perspective, one problem with the way Mr.
Eastwood used the empty chair is that he did not sit in the chair
himself and put himself in the president˙s shoes. Often people feel
better having the opportunity to excoriate someone in the empty chair.
Certainly it˙s enjoyable, and perhaps even cathartic, to be able to say
angry and sarcastic things to someone who has hurt or disappointed us.
Perhaps Mr. Eastwood felt better having that opportunity.
Yet we could have all learned more if Mr. Eastwood had followed through
and actually put himself in the chair. What would the president have
said in response to some of his remarks? For example, when Mr. Eastwood
seemed to contrast the president˙s attitude toward the war in Iraq with his attitude toward Afghanistan
(the latter being something worth doing), in the president˙s role Mr.
Eastwood might have felt compelled to point out that Afghanistan was
initiated by President George W. Bush and that he supported it as needed
to clear out Al Qaeda˙s training camps. Perhaps Mr. Eastwood˙s views
would have become more generous if he had taken the president˙s role.
So Mr. Eastwood wasted an important educational and therapeutic moment
from which our deadlocked political system could benefit: putting
himself in the role of the other person of whom he is critical and
coming to understand that person˙s point of view from inside.
Democrats are not necessarily more comfortable with such ideas. At the
height of the Vietnam War, my father offered to help President Lyndon B.
Johnson and the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh feel the pressures
each was under by directing them in a psychodrama. Perhaps the deaths of
so many tens of thousands of men, women and children could have been
averted. But my father got a curt brushoff from Bill Moyers, then the
White House press secretary, informing him that diplomacy was not a
psychotherapy theater game. But of course any practitioner or historian
of diplomacy knows that often that˙s exactly what it is.
America lost its chance for a psychodramatic moment at the Republican
convention. Too bad. That really would have made my day.
Jonathan D. Moreno
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