Mental Health as a Vision of Ecological Safety | Part 8

John P. Flynt, PhD
Oct 31, 2023
2 min read

Updated: Nov 10, 2023

Safety in Rituals of Mental Health

Ritual and Performance

Moving from one moment of safety to another does not go on forever. As mentioned before, there is a happy ending. Since a ritual is a series of actions that leads to some type of enhanced awareness of life, rituals culminate at certain points. The culmination can involve the actions of an hour or several years. But regardless of the time span, with this culmination, the need to perform begins.

This succession of activity (ritual to performance) was originally described by the anthropologist Victor Turner in his studies of Ndembu culture (The Ritual Process). Turner observed that while ritual is an essential aspect of culture, it is an unconscious process of seeking fulfilment of the need for meaning. To reach fulfillment, metamorphosizes into performance, which can be described as the conscious realization of the meaning ritual creates unconsciously. In the language of neuroscience, metamorphosis might also be described as the right (or unconscious) brain furnishing the left brain with the underlying flow neurological data from which conscious awareness emerges.*

Performance is an activity that takes place on a stage. It is recognized as both projected to an audience and received by an audience. In the realm of psychodrama, this duality becomes foggy, so that audience and performer are in many ways indistinguishable. This is also characteristic of discussion of communication in interpersonal psychology. We are formed by my interactions with others, and others are formed by their interactions with us. But to keep things simple, with the primary model of the stage and the audience, the theater features a stage and an auditorium. The performer is on the stage and performs for an audience.

The performance that emerges from ritual discovery involves two activities. One is telling the story. Another is repeating the ritual discovery and improving on it. Telling the story is narrating—uniting the memories and feelings into a unified whole that has a beginning, middle, and end. With repetition, we seek to do again what we have done, revisiting the sense of fulfillment so that we can enhance our experience of its discovery. In an experience that has brought renewed and deepened feeling to life, performance extends experience so that it is connected to more moments of life, in this way increasing meaning.