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Issue #4 |
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I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. Confucius
 Psychodrama, a role playing method that has become a therapy of choice in the addictions field, was developed by psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno in turn of the century Vienna.Neuropsychology is only now catching up with what Moreno preached in the 1930s, that “the body remembers what the mind forgets”. Thanks to J L and Zerka Moreno we have a method of healing that can restore us not only to sanity but to our own spontaneity and creativity. We are human beings of action, not only words, in fact we communicate through gesture and facial expressions before words even enter the picture. Psychodrama, with it’s ability to include all of our rich, gestural interactive, language, to, in fact, begin there if necessary, e.g. “show us don’t tell us”, can recreate the relational context and conditions necessary to attach feeling to gesture at the appropriate developmental level. Moreno believed that people are fundamentally role players, that we express ourselves through the roles we play at any given time e.g. daughter, son, father, mother, sister, friend, doctor, husband, athlete and so on. The function of the role, according to Moreno, is to enter the unconscious and give it shape and definition. The roles we learn in childhood and later play out as adults, have this web of unconscious, associated meanings from gesture and word, embedded into them. Roles have physical, mental and relational components. When we work with the roles, we enter into the somatic, intrapersonal and interpersonal unconscious world of the client. In the heat of the psychodrama, thinking, feeling and behavior emerge along with its web of associated meaning. Psychodrama reawakens the sleeping child inside the adult, who used to communicate in body language. As clients watch this real life enactment unfold before their eyes, or witness a protagonist with whom they identify, they feel along with them into a forgotten world. They become purposeful and attending. Through clinical role-play, we can modify our early emotional and psychological language and experience. ."The unconscious can continue to expand through new and ongoing, affectively charged relational or regulatory experiences"(Schore 2004) as we do, undo and redo experience we move towards "more complex psychobiological states and higher levels of self reflection."(ibid) Below are parts of an interview with Zerka Moreno, wife of JL and co-developer of the field of psychodrama, Throughout my own training with Zerka I so enjoyed her stories of how this magical method developed that I wanted others in my field to share in some of her deep and wonderful wisdom. Zerka, in her recent book, The Quintessential Zerka, Zerka describes that…….. “Moreno is the originator of psychodrama, sociometry and a pioneer of group psychotherapy; he was my husband for twenty five years and my co-worker for thirty-three years. I have continued to develop especially psychodrama and role theory since his death in 1974 and until the present time. Moreno's career was burdened by being a pioneer in a field dominated by the teaching of another older genius, Sigmund Freud. Moreno found barriers whenever he declared his opposition to many of Freud's ideas, the major one being that he did not believe that language was the royal route to the human psyche. He found an older, more primeval underlying level, namely that of action and interaction between humans. He declared that the psyche is an open system, constantly influenced and shaped - or misshaped - by the interactional environment in which the human being develops. He knew that to reach this level, words were not enough, that it required action and interaction, that it is the area 'between' people that demands our attention. He also stated clearly that spontaneity and creativity are the major forces of human beings, replacing the idea that it is merely instincts that drive them, and that these can work for good or ill. He proclaimed that the human being is a player of roles; these roles bring with them their natural expression in interaction. He described psychodrama as 'Shakespearean' psychiatry as we are all improvisational actors on the stage of life. So he created instruments to uncover, explore and if need be, change that area 'in between' humans, such as sociometry, meaning measurement of interpersonal relations, psychodrama, meaning the individual psyche put into action through improvisational drama out of which grew sociodrama, the interaction of social beings in a dramatic context. The latter has become generally known as role-playing.” Tian: What would you say Moreno’s vision was? Zerka: Moreno's work, whether we think of sociometry, psychodrama or sociodrama, is to help us reformulate the world and ourselves within it, into a more creative, fulfilling one. The core of his spirit resides in spontaneity and creativity. Moreno wanted to bring a new order into society at large through the application of action sociometry….. He wanted to heal the entire world order. He began his book Who Shall Survive with the first sentence: "A truly therapeutic procedure cannot have less ofobjective than the whole of mankind." He did not think that psychodrama, whatever its healing, could do it all by itself. He thought we needed to overhaul the entire way humans relate to one another. Unfortunately, it meant a revolution which our world is not yet ready for. He considered undergoing changes in small groups is fine, but he also hoped for a larger stage on which to accomplish his ideas……. Psychodrama found more general acceptance [and received more attention but Moreno felt that “sociometry” could be a more powerful healing tool for society at large]. In fact, he said Sociometry is the umbrella under which all his other ideas fell, but it is more threatening to the existing social order if it is honestly applied because leadership would be of an entirely different order from what we have. We only need to look around us to see how much his dream is needed. His ideas were utopic but not acceptable. Tian: You’ve said that Moreno did not want to see psychodrama limited to the mental health field alone, can you explain that? Zerka: Moreno never felt psychodrama should be limited to the mental health field. He wanted it to be a way of living, to enrich our life. That’s just why he created sociodrama and axiodrama, neither of which are sufficiently used as such a way of living. [Note to reader: He wanted it in schools, hospice, business, in the home and in the streets, Alvin Toffler in Future Shock said that in the “home of the future” every home would have a psychodrama stage in it where family members could explore and rid themselves of conflicts and complexes rather than take them out on each other] Tian: Is healing through catharsis central to psychodrama? Zerka: Moreno did not believe in "an unconscious." Nor in verbal catharsis. Those are misinterpretations. He talked of "unconscious or conscious states" and he believed in action catharsis Even more original, he believed patients could get well without any visible catharsis, as the process worked silently, internally, below the verbal level. Insight was just an artifact not something to pursue by itself. He was a genius ahead of his time, and a genius sees the world differently from others. Just look at our scientific history . He was greatly misunderstood even by those who wrote about him. [Note to reader: What Zerka is talking about here is that Moreno believed in action insight which is very consistent with trauma treatment, that the body holds the memory of trauma and that as we physically move our body begins to remember what our mind has forgotten. Moreno believed that if a client could “see himself in action” in a safe environment he would be able to have his own “action insights” into his own behavior rather than relying entirely on the therapist to be the only purveyor of wisdom and insight. He believed that in this way, people could self correct] Tian: Tell us about the “Empty Chair” Zerka, where did it begin? Zerka: Moreno devised "the auxiliary chair" (read: ‘empty chair’) as an interpersonal tool. Perls copied it as an intrapersonal tool, thus removing the core of interaction between people, like in individual-centered therapy. I think he did not really understand Moreno's original view and focus on interaction; he was still an individual-focused therapist, never used auxiliary egos. He was the only source of therapy. Tian: Can you give us some examples of ways to use the “empty chair”? Zerka: I have used it as a warm up to workshops, the protagonist speaking to him/herself, f.i. what they expect to gain from the workshop or what concern they brought with them or what they have learned from previous sessions, either with me or someone else as director, if they were known to have been in psychodrama before. Also, I have added not only the above, but keeping the protagonist in role reversal position throughout the session, until the final closing scene, some as a significant other, some as a beloved object. Tian: So is action the ‘royal route’ to the psyche? Zerka: Psychodrama is largely a "do-it-yourself-project-in-action." (Note to reader: The idea here is that moving the body warms up emotions, as emotion is, after all, stored in the body and reveals itself oftentimes through particular gestures and movements). I say…. “Director, get out of the way whenever you can and yield the stage to the protagonist. Give the protagonist his/her space. After all, this not your drama., it's theirs.” I learned not to do anything for a protagonist on stage that they can do for themselves, such as helping to arrange objects for the protagonist who is scene setting. I put it this way in my sessions, when group members or auxiliaries (role players) want to help and the objects are not heavy or dangerous to anyone: "Don't become gentlemen of the American moving industry. Let him/her do it him/her self." The same is true for making lists of feelings on a board or paper or making drawings for the protagonist, or picking up chairs representing absentees. (Note to reader: Zerka feels that part of the warming up process for the protagonist lies in doing their own ‘scene setting’, it helps them to ‘get into’ their drama’) Tian: What are some of your special contributions to the method would you say? Zerka: My special contributions are:
Tian: You use a lot of creative approaches in your work; can you describe a few for us? Zerka: On Tools and Techniques
On adolescents
An increasingly significant aspect of psychodrama in light of the neurological research that has given depth and meaning to the body-mind movement, is psychodrama's ability to allow the body to be a part of the therapeutic process. “A picture is worth a thousand words.” The purpose of psychodramatic role plays is to resolve through action insight rather than talk alone. Neuropsychology, according to Bessel van der Kolk in his seminal research on post traumatic stress disorder, has clearly demonstrated that words alone cannot fully integrate the disordered and disorganized feeling memories and sense impressions (read: sights, sounds, smells, body sensations etc) associated with traumatic experience. We need a method of treatment that actually allows the body to have a voice, to come forward into the therapeutic arena and tell it’s story through action before it is asked to “reflect” through words. Through role play, thinking, feeling and behavior emerge simultaneously and spontaneously to allow for a fuller picture of what is being carried in the psyche to come into view.
References American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition. 1994. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association. |
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