All Done By Kindness

The following poster was one used by David Devant, perhaps England's greatest 20th Century magician and one of the world's best.

It may be hard to read but below Devant's name is a slogan, "All done by kindness."

That brought to mind what my primary psychodrama trainer, Carl Hollander, said: "Be kind and you will have a good psychodrama."

Carl was not talking about being soft. He knew the director must impel protagonists to expose their deepest issues, purge them, find understanding, integrate the experience, learn new ways of dealing with the issues, and move on in life.

We show kindness by being tough, not mean. That may require that we make the protagonists uncomfortable. A catharsis is not comfortable and many of our protagonists need to reach the catharsis of abreaction in order to break out of the morass of the past.

We fail our protagonists if we are not tough enough to help them through their psychodramatic process.

(A larger image of the Devant poster can be found online at www.nnmagic.com)