Philadelphia

MANY found Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican National Convention odd, but I found it oddly familiar. When Mr. Eastwood set up a chair next to the podium and used it in an imaginary dialogue with the president, I recognized it as a technique from psychodrama — the psychotherapy my father, the psychiatrist J. L. Moreno, started developing nearly 100 years ago.

Therapists often use the “empty chair” as a way of orienting a patient to a particular relationship. “Here’s your mom,” they might say. “What would you say to her if she were here, right now?” The empty chair can be a very powerful warm-up to a problematic situation, a way of concretizing dormant, suppressed or abstract emotions in an important or troubling relationship. Used properly, it can lead to insight.

It makes sense that Mr. Eastwood, an actor and director, would come up with the idea of using the empty chair as a device in his speech on Thursday evening. Like many other psychodrama techniques, the empty chair has also been used in training actors to feel themselves in their roles. Some of my father’s techniques have been compared to those of the famous acting teacher Constantin Stanislavsky and his “method acting” school, which has had an especially great influence on the American theater.

However, from the therapeutic perspective, one problem with the way Mr. Eastwood used the empty chair is that he did not sit in the chair himself and put himself in the president’s shoes. Often people feel better having the opportunity to excoriate someone in the empty chair. Certainly it’s enjoyable, and perhaps even cathartic, to be able to say angry and sarcastic things to someone who has hurt or disappointed us. Perhaps Mr. Eastwood felt better having that opportunity.