What's a 'Performance Therapist?'

In this blog, we've already established that we'll attempt to help therapists (particularly psychodynamic ones) find their place in the mystifying modern mental health milieu. As a practicing therapist's responsibilities now range from social media marketer to insurance expert, it seems the whole notion of how we define the career is in flux.

Like any other individual trapped in the age of the internet, forced to advertise their wares and sundries on the web, the line between who a therapist is in the therapy room and outside of it can vary. Who is the therapist as they're speaking on the phone, negotiating with office rental agents? Who is the therapist emailing a supervisor or conceptualizing a case in group supervision? Does this person exist under the multi-layered umbrella of "therapist," – and if so, how do they parse and re-integrate the permutations of their identity to be whichever authentic self the moment calls for?

The world we live in is hardly one of veritable, constant truth. Performance is everywhere – from conversations over coffee to boardrooms and Zoom calls to the computer I write this post on. And the word has evolved from a statement about the arts into a method of turning any belief into an expression and how that expression is articulated. The line between performance and authenticity is blurred. It exists in the middle of "real and fake," yes, right next to the therapist, who knows the ambiguity of the human condition better than anyone. But being cognizant of the disconnect between identity expression and knowing of the self is only half the battle, especially when the battle is creating and maintaining a professional persona constantly knocked about by the earthquakes of your patient's psyches. This is where my idea comes in – the idea of the performance therapist.

What's the performance therapist?

In my forthcoming book (and in general), I use the identity of the performance artist to piece together modern therapeutic identity. The natural chemistry of this admittedly questionable interdisciplinary combination churns out a nice, neat little branch of personhood: the performance therapist (rather than the performance artist, of course).

Imagine it like this: performance art is performed within an unconventional narrative format, in any size in length or scope, planned or unplanned, rehearsed or unrehearsed. The establishment of performance art came from dissatisfaction with the available modes of artistic expression (Goldberg, 2011). Their bodies became canvases, their noises became words, and their actions became theater. They used whatever they could to relay what they believed or felt and make sense of the chaos in their minds. And if performance art is about expressing beliefs, then the process of therapy is how we can think about understanding what those beliefs mean to us.

In a way, therapy explores who we are, and performance art explores how we show it to the world. It provides context for a therapist to see how they act, act out, enact, want to be seen, and attempt to be perceived – it allows them to perform intentionally rather than impulsively. It also illuminates authentic drives, wishes, and fears within your psyche, bringing to light intricacies in your therapeutic practice. This is how the performance therapist comes into being.

Who claims this label?

Should the performance therapist accept this label, they have a goal much like the performance artist's. The latter seeks to physically embody a notion that they feel empowered to disperse, whether political, personal, or questioning the totality of art as a concept. Like them, the performance therapist feels compelled, in the way that the artist is, to relay to their patients the nuances and existential elements of therapy – something they've spent so long cultivating. In this, the therapist goes from just a person bearing witness to their fellow man to an idea, a specific philosophy incarnate, informed by their own thoughts, feelings, and study, guiding another through the peaks and valleys of their mind's topography. That is their end, the notion they are empowered to disperse: patients can examine themselves without fear of fragmentation, just as the therapist has done.

The Performance Therapist in Action

Coming back to the post at hand. A performance therapist aims to work toward the ultimate aspiration of performing their role with all the authenticity they can muster. They need not have the presence of mind to call themselves a performance therapist, but they certainly can. And those who do yearn to decipher and explore how being a mental health practitioner – especially one at this moment in history – sublimate their values, principles, characteristics, and features into a holistic picture of their therapeutic identity.

Being a performance therapist is not easy, and it is a path yet unexplored, spanning far into the future. But it's one that we'll be working out together by investigating relevant issues in the vast contemporary ecosystem of practicing therapists.