Goals:
- Be able to define script and understand how scripts assemble and magnify sets of scenes.
- How might therapists use script theory to better understand their clients’ suffering?
Readings:
TT, James Duffy, “What’s a Script?” October 5, 1998
Bulletin, v3, #1-2, 1996, Donald L. Nathanson, “What’s a Script”, pp. 1-4.
EA, “Script Theory,” pp. 312-334.
Bulletin, v1, #2, 1994, Vernon Kelly, “Intimate Notes,” pp. 5-7.
Discussion Questions:
- What is a script? How is it formed?
- What is key to the development of consciousness?
- Tomkins states “consciousness is a report about affect-driven imagery.” What does he mean by this?
- What does Nathanson mean by SARS?
- Explain the idea that scripts are the set of rules for the ordering of information about SARS.
- Explain our tendency to distort perception in order to make data fit into preexisting scripts.
- What role does affect play in coordinating scenes and responses to them?
- What is the difference between affect amplification (as in innate scripts) and psychological magnification (as in learned scripts)?
- How does magnification originate in early infancy? Is it always “heroic”?
- What is the difference between how a person acts in a scene with and without a script?
- Define information advantage, affect density, magnification advantage.
- Why is a person more conscious of scenes rather than rules for ordering them?
- What is “critical interscene distance” and how does it change with magnification?
- Tomkins states that scripts are more self-validating than self-fulfilling. What does this mean?
- Scripts are incomplete and conditional. How do individuals modify scripts to deal with unanticipated conditions?