Jacob Levy Moreno’s psychodrama: what does it consist of?

Plays as part of a therapeutic approach.

Since it began to be popularized in Europe and the United States during the early 1920s, Jacob Levy Moreno's psychodrama has captured the attention of many people, Jacob Levy Moreno's psychodrama has captured the attention of many people.e.

This may be due, in part, to the striking nature of psychodrama sessions: a group of people who appear to be acting out a play based on improvisation. However, Levy Moreno conceived of these sessions as a psychotherapy tool based on assumptions that go beyond based on assumptions that go beyond the simple desire to have a good time. Let's take a look at the theory behind psychodrama and how it shapes the sessions in which it is used.

Who was Jacob Levy Moreno?

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 started an initiative based on theatrical improvisation, which would give way to a psychotherapeutic proposal 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 his own subjective experiences through unplanned dramatizations.

In addition, Moreno studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he came into contact with there he came into contact with the ideas of psychoanalytic theory, which was gaining acceptance in Austria.which was gaining acceptance in Austria during the first half of the 20th century. Although the father of psychodrama rejected many of Sigmund Freud's assumptions, psychoanalysis had a marked influence on his thinking, as we shall see. He also 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. from New York he began to develop both psychodrama and other elements related to the study of groups, such as sociometry.such as sociometry. He also theorized about forms of group psychotherapy in general, starting from a heterodox point of view that rejected determinism and extolled the role of improvisation. After devoting much of his life to developing methods of group therapy, he died in 1974 at the age of 84.

What is psychodrama?

To begin to understand what psychodrama is and what objectives it seeks to achieve, let us first review its appearances: the way in which one of its sessions unfolds. To understand minimally what we will see below, it is only necessary to understand two things: that psychodrama sessions are in a group, but that psychodrama does not seek to address problems manifested by a group, but uses the presence of many people to intervene in the problems of individuals, in turn.

Thus, 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 the protagonists.The other people are members who help in the realization of 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 gathers and the person who energizes the act encourages the others to perform ice-breaking exercises.. The purpose of the warm-up is to make people disinhibited, aware of the beginning of the session and more willing to express themselves through actions that in another context would be outlandish.

2. Dramatization

Dramatization is the core of psychodrama sessions.. In this, one of the persons attending the group is chosen, and he/she explains a little of what problem has made him/her attend the session and what is the autobiographical background associated with it. The person leading the session tries to make the protagonist of the dramatization phase explain the way in which he or she perceives this problem in the present, rather than trying to make him or her remember exactly the details of the problem.

After this, the role-playing begins, in which the protagonist is helped by the other members of the group, who play a role, and all improvise scenes related to the problem to be addressed. However, this representation does not follow a fixed script, but is based on improvisation supported by very few guidelines as to 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; we will see why later.

3. Group echo

In the last phase, tll the people involved in the performance explain what they have felt, how the performance has made them feel, how the performance has made them feel, and how the performance has made them feel.how the performance has made them evoke past experiences.

The basics of psychodrama

Now that we have seen what a typical psychodrama session basically consists of, let's see what principles it is based on, what the philosophy behind it is. To do this, we must first of all start from the concept of catharsis, first explained by the philosopher Aristotle, as a phenomenon by which the person understands himself better after having experienced a play that represents a series of events. This was very applicable to theatrical dramatizations, in which there was almost always a climax. almost always had a climax that sought to awaken intense emotions in the spectators and to offer a denouement that and offer a denouement 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 the 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-Creativityaccording to which creative responses to unforeseen situations is 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 we have become accustomed to in analyzing a problem must be broken by engaging in unanticipated situations. In this way, the process of emotional liberation is born out of a creative and spontaneous factsomething more meaningful to oneself than a fiction seen from outside the work. For this creative catharsis to take place, it is not necessary to reproduce past experiences exactly, but to make the session evoke elements that in the present the protagonist believes to be significant and related to the conflict to be dealt with.

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 part of people's minds, and a 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 psychodrama tries to deal with are conceived as "conflicts". This word expresses the clash between the conscious and the unconscious.: a part contains representations related to the origin of the problem and struggles to express them, while the conscious part wants to disappear the symptoms that produce the attempts of the unconscious to express what it contains.

For Moreno, psychodrama allows the symptoms of the problem to be reproduced through one's own acts guided by the conscious part of oneself. guided by the conscious part of oneself; in a way, the problem is reproduced, but this time the process is guided by the consciousness, allowing oneself to appropriate the conflict that remained blocked and to integrate them into one's personality in a healthy way.

Psychoanalysis also pursued the objective of having blocked experiences emerge into consciousness in a systematized 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 he the need for the process to also involve the participation of the whole body through the movements performed during role playing in the that are made during role playing on a stage.

The effectiveness of psychodrama

Psychodrama is not part of the therapeutic proposals with scientifically proven efficacy, which means that the skeptical community in health psychology does not consider it as an effective tool.This 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 rests have been rejected by the epistemology on which scientific psychology currently relies.

To some extent, psychodrama focuses so much on subjective experiences and the very processes of signification that it is said that its results cannot be measured systematically and objectively. 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, however subjective the problem to be treated.

This does not detract from the fact that psychodrama is still practiced, as is the case with family constellations, whose sessions may resemble those of the classic psychodrama of Jacob Levy Moreno. That is why, when faced with problems related to mental health, alternatives with proven effectiveness in different types of problems, such as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, are chosen.