![\"\"](\"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/I-Ching-jpeg.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
A career psychotherapist recently wrote me about a method he is developing to employ theater in the therapy process, including an association with the I Ching.<\/p>\n
Many years ago he had encountered our Dramatica Theory of Narrative<\/a> and noted a similarity between the elements of Dramatica and the I Ching and wished to discuss the issue.<\/p>\n Here is my reply:<\/p>\n Many years ago, a couple of folks noticed a correlation between Dramatica and the I Ching, and they independently prepared two articles about their findings.<\/span><\/p>\n Here\u2019s a link to the first article, which focuses on an I Ching perspective of the 8 Dramatica archetypes:<\/span><\/p>\n http:\/\/storymind.com\/dramatica\/noas_archetypes.htm<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Here is a link to the second article, which breaks down the elements of the archetypes into specific trigrams:<\/span><\/p>\n http:\/\/storymind.com\/dramatica\/i_ching\/chris_lofting\/chris_lofting_1.htm<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n I, myself, did a small amount of passing research into the Pristine Y King, which is ostensibly an early unpoliticized version of the the I Ching, and found that our chart of the 64 elements matched up by nature almost perfectly with the 8 x 8 chart of the I Ching hexagrams.<\/span><\/p>\n My conclusion was that the I Ching and Dramatica are both looking at the same natural phenomenon and simply describing it in two different but similar ways.<\/span><\/p>\n I think casting the I Ching is simply chaos, like choosing one of the arrangement of dramatic elements as a storyform in Dramatica. \u00a0It is an arbitrary arrangement from the un-biased set, the same was as words are arbitrary arrangements of the same alphabet.<\/span><\/p>\n But where did this set come from in the first place, and what is the natural phenomenon it seeks to describe?<\/span><\/p>\n To that end, in the later years of my active career as a narrative theorist, I discovered a process of group psychology that I believe explains how and why that set of elements has come to be.<\/span><\/p>\n Here is a link to that article:<\/span><\/p>\n https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/narrative-psychology-to-know-oneself\/<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n So, a model of narrative is tantamount to a model of the mind itself including both a documentation of the process of individual coping and problem solving and also of one\u2019s interactions and roles as part of multiple groups and multiple narratives. \u00a0Internal and external narratives – that is the key and that is the driving force and nature of the elements of Dramatica and those of the I Ching.<\/span><\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/storymind.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/11\/Screenshot-2023-11-27-3.58.58-PM.png\")
<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"