Listening at the edge: Attending to living process in Sesame Dramatherapy

This essay will outline some of the means and implications of attending to living processes in Sesame Dramatherapy. Broadly defined, living processes are those which exceed rigid, reductive, fixed or thing-like concepts. Insofar as our more mobile concepts often collapse into fixed definitions or signs, we might say that living processes resist conceptualisation altogether. I will consider how to avoid objectifying living processes which, as a category, encompass psychic processes and our experiences of other people and living beings. I will investigate how it is possible to enter into an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the diverse phenomena of Sesame Dramatherapy sessions, stepping out of ‘I-it’, objectifying ways of relating. In order to do this, I will draw upon three main philosophical streams: Goethean observation, phenomenology and Eugene Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. Some of the therapeutic implications of this will then be outlined, with particular reference to the creation of meaning and the experience of selfhood