Viennese psychiatrist Jakob Levy Moreno is the founder of psychodrama: a therapeutic method in which life situations or fantasies are staged in order to experience them anew and free oneself from entrenched role structures.
The psychodrama
The group leaders of cancer self-help groups attend an advanced training seminar. Their concern: they want to deal appropriately with the seriously and terminally ill. Even though they know the disease from their own experience, they sometimes feel helpless, sometimes overwhelmed when dealing with patients.
The seminar leader asks them to act out scenes with the sick. Immediately, a certain role pattern becomes recognizable, namely a tireless way of repeatedly encouraging newly ill patients.
Now the seminar leader asks for a role reversal. The (sick) participants now experience the effect of the well-intentioned behavior: an avalanche of encouragement and affirmation of life, which leaves hardly any room to talk about fears in particular. It is also important to them to have listeners and to experience understanding – something that the group leaders had originally found healing themselves.
After this role reversal, almost all of the group leaders were able to fundamentally change their behavior and respond more empathetically. (quoted from: The Psychodrama by Martina Rosenbaum and Ulrike Kroneck, Stuttgart, 2007).
“Acting is more healing than talking.”
In a nutshell, psychodrama means enacting behaviors. Within a framework agreed upon with the participants, it is about trying out actions, observing them, comparing them, and experiencing them in their effects from both one’s own and the opposite role. In psychodrama, the psyche stages itself and its problems on a stage.
The terms are similar to those used in theater – there are protagonists, antagonists, spectators and a stage manager – the therapist, but there is no script or screenplay. This is because the goal of psychodrama is to activate and integrate spontaneity and creativity. “Constructive spontaneous action has come about when the protagonist finds a new and appropriate reaction for a new or already known situation.” (from: J.L. Moreno, Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, 1959).
Behavior change through talking and listening
Many procedures of psychotherapy are based on talking. Jakob Levy Moreno (1890-1974), however, developed his ideas and concepts while observing children at play. “My practical beginnings date back to 1910. In the gardens of Vienna, in the years between 1910 and 1914, I began to form groups of children, to play with them extemporaneously, and thus to plant the seed for group psychotherapy and psychodrama.” From this he organized role-playing and impromptu play for adults and studied the effect of spontaneous play.
Moreno’s motto is “Action is more healing than talk,” or even “Getting to the truth of the soul through action.” Thus, role plays or other enactments are well suited to make conflict situations visible, to work on them and even to find new strategies for conflict resolution in playful action. The scenic and playful presentation allows the available role repertoire to be expanded and behavioral patterns to be tested.
And here one factor is quite decisive: by actively doing something, the fellow players, the protagonists and antagonists, become aware of their actions. The experience is an experience of action that, although acted out, is nevertheless a real, even physical experience. Ideally, a change in behavior occurs immediately – as in the example of the group leaders who learned to listen better and became more empathetic.
