ABSTRACT
I have been growing fond of the “Knight of the sorrowful countenance” in spite not only of the fact that he is a fictional character but also that, even within the literary frame, he is an imaginary person, devised by the “madness” of the lonesome hidalgo of La Mancha, who, in its turn, is influenced by the literary world, including Cervantes’ book itself.
To some extent, Don Quixote can be seen as a forerunner of the postmodern identity fragmentation, which has eventually led to the deconstruction of the concept of Self at the beginning of the third millennium: the idea that there is nothing like a “noumenal” Self behind the “phenomenal” manifestations of the person; the Self is considered instead as an illusory construct, which can be either a necessary armour or a dangerous hoax.
But if the Self is a delusion, what about therapy? We have been taught that restoring people's “real” selves is one of the therapy's aims, but what if there is nothing to restore? Where can we find solid ground upon which we can establish a transformative process?
One of the basic tenets of dramatherapy is that the dramatic tendency is an inborn human feature, manifesting itself both in our cultural inheritance, in the forms of theatre and ritual, and in our individual development, in the form of dramatic play. Therefore, its main hypothesis is that the structure of drama itself can provide us with a pattern to understand human nature. Can this pattern give us some useful insights into what we call our Selves?
In my unremitting quest for a comprehensive theory of dramatherapy, I have tried to show how the intimate structure of drama might guide us to a deeper knowledge of who we are and how we function (Pitruzzella 2006, 2016). More recently, I tried to connect the key elements of drama with the new paradigm of human nature 69emerging from the recent confluence of studies in various fields: neurosciences, cognitive sciences and philosophy of the mind, psycho-linguistic studies on metaphor, complexity theories, enactivism and intersubjectivity research.
The result is a descriptive model of human development in a world of relationships, which I called the Dramatic Self Paradigm: a complex and comprehensive model, which can help us to understand the blocks that can hinder a balanced growth.
The model will be developed at length in my next book: here I present for the first time some of the major lines of inquiry that support it. I hope it can eventually encourage readers to acknowledge that Don Quixote's weakness is precisely his strength.
