The Psychodrama Of Jacob Levy Moreno: What Does It Consist Of?
Since it began to become popular in Europe and the United States during the early 1920s, Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychodrama has captured the attention of many people and.
This may be due, in part, to the flashiness of psychodrama sessions: a group of people appearing to perform a play based on improvisation. However, Levy Moreno conceived these sessions as a psychotherapy tool based on assumptions that go beyond the simple desire to have a fun time. Let’s see what the theory underlying psychodrama is and how it shapes the sessions in which it is used.
The creator of psychodrama was born in Bucharest in 1889 into a Sephardic Jewish family. Some years after settling in Vienna in 1915, Levy Moreno began an initiative based on theatrical improvisation, which would give way to a psychotherapeutic proposal that he called psychodrama. Psychodrama was based on the idea that expressing oneself through spontaneity and improvisation was a kind of liberation through creativity, which had to do with one’s own subjective experiences through unplanned dramatizations.
Furthermore, Moreno studied Medicine at the University of Vienna, and There he came into contact with the ideas of psychoanalytic theory which was gaining acceptance in Austria during the first half of the 20th century. XX. Although the father of psychodrama rejected many of Sigmund Freud’s assumptions, psychoanalysis had a marked influence on his thinking, as we will see. Similarly, he experimented with a type of intervention that could be considered a primitive form of mutual aid group.
In 1925 Levy Moreno moved to the United States of America, and From New York he began to develop both psychodrama and other elements related to the study of groups. such as sociometry. He also theorized about forms of group psychotherapy in general, starting from a heterodox perspective that rejected determinism and praised the role of improvisation. After dedicating a good part of his life to developing group therapy methods, he died in 1974 at the age of 84.
What is psychodrama?
To begin to understand what psychodrama is and what objectives it tries to achieve, let’s first review its appearance: the way in which one of its sessions is developed. To minimally understand what we will see below, it is only necessary to understand two things: that psychodrama sessions are in groups, but that psychodrama does not seek to address problems expressed by a group, but rather uses the presence of many people to intervene in the problems. problems of individuals, in turns.
So, At each moment there is a clear protagonist, who is the one towards whom the session should be oriented. while the rest of the people are members who help in carrying out the session and who, at some point, will also be the protagonists of their own psychodrama.
These are the phases of a psychodrama session:
1. Warm-up
In the first phase of the psychodrama session, a group of people gets together and the person who organizes the event encourages the others to do exercises to break the ice. The objective of the warm-up is to make people lose their inhibitions, become aware of the beginning of the session and be more willing to express themselves through actions that in another context would be bizarre.
2. Dramatization
Dramatization is the core of psychodrama sessions. In this, one of the people who attends the group is chosen, and he explains a little about what problem has caused him to attend the session and what is the autobiographical background that is associated with it. The person leading the session tries to get the protagonist of the dramatization phase to explain the way in which he or she perceives this problem in the present, rather than trying to get him or her to remember exactly the details of it.
After this, the dramatization begins, in which the protagonist is helped by the rest of the members of the group, who play a role, and everyone improvises scenes related to the problem to be discussed. However, this representation does not follow a fixed script, but is based on improvisation supported by very few guidelines on what the scene should be. The idea is not to faithfully reproduce scenes based on reality, but to offer a similar context in certain essential points; then we will see why.
3. Group echo
In the last phase, tAll the people involved in the performance explain what they felt the way in which the performance has made them evoke past experiences.
Now that we have seen what a typical psychodrama session basically consists of, let’s see what principles it is based on, what is the philosophy behind it. To do this, we must first start from the concept of catharsis, first explained by the philosopher Aristotle, as a phenomenon by which a person understands themselves better after having experienced a work that represents a series of events. This was very applicable to theatrical dramatizations, in which There was almost always a climax that sought to awaken intense emotions in the viewers. and offer an outcome that represented a process of emotional liberation.
For Jacob Levy Moreno, the idea on which the therapeutic potential of psychodrama was based was that it allowed catharsis to go from being secondary, experienced by the spectator, to being an active catharsis, experienced by protagonists of dramatizations.
The Spontaneity-Creativity Theory
And why was this form of catharsis supposed to be better? This idea was based on the theory of Spontaneity-Creativity according to which creative responses to unforeseen situations are the best mechanism for discovering new solutions to old problems that remain entrenched for a long time.
In other words, the inability to see beyond the mental path to which we have become accustomed to analyzing a problem must be broken by engaging in unforeseen situations. Thus, The emotional liberation process is born from a creative and spontaneous event something more meaningful to oneself than a fiction seen from outside the work. For this creative catharsis to occur, it is not necessary to reproduce past experiences exactly, but rather the session must evoke elements that the protagonist currently believes are significant and related to the conflict to be discussed.
The relationship between psychodrama and psychoanalysis
The link between Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychodrama and the psychoanalytic current is based, among other things, on the implication that there is an unconscious instance of people’s minds, and another conscious one.
Some problems remain fixed in the unconscious part, causing the conscious part to suffer the symptoms of this without being able to access their origin. That is why the problems that are attempted to be addressed through psychodrama are conceived as “conflicts.” This word expresses the clash between conscious and unconscious : one part contains representations related to the origin of the problem and struggles to express them, while the conscious part wants the symptoms produced by the unconscious attempts to express what it contains to disappear.
For Moreno, Psychodrama allows the symptoms of the problem to be reproduced through one’s own actions. guided by the conscious part of oneself; In some way, the problem is reproduced, but this time the process is guided by consciousness, allowing oneself to take ownership of the conflict that remained blocked and integrate it into one’s personality in a healthy way.
Psychoanalysis also pursued the objective of making blocked experiences emerge into consciousness in a systematic way so that the patient could re-interpret and appropriate them. However, Jacob Levy Moreno did not want this task to be based only on the reinterpretation of something, but rather pointed out the need for the process to also involve the participation of the entire body through movements that are performed during role playing on stage.
The effectiveness of psychodrama
Psychodrama is not part of the therapeutic proposals that have scientifically proven effectiveness. which means that the skeptical community in health psychology does not consider it as an effective tool. On the other hand, the psychoanalytic foundations on which it is based have been rejected by the epistemology on which scientific psychology is based today.
To some extent, psychodrama focuses so much on subjective experiences and processes of meaning that it is said to its results cannot be measured systematically and objectively. However, critics of this perspective point out that there are ways to take into account the effects that any psychotherapy has on patients, no matter how subjective the problem being treated is.
This does not mean that psychodrama is still practiced, as is the case with family constellations, whose sessions can resemble those of Jacob Levy Moreno’s classic psychodrama. That is why, when faced with problems related to mental health, alternatives with proven effectiveness in different types of problems are chosen, such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.
