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 caught the attention of many peopleand.

It is possible that this is due, in part, to the flashiness of psychodrama sessions: a group of people who seem to perform a play based on improvisation. However, Levy Moreno he conceived these sessions as a psychotherapy tool based on assumptions that go beyond the simple desire to have a good time. Let's see what the theory behind psychodrama consists of and how it shapes the sessions in which it is used.

Who was Jacob Levy Moreno?

The creator of the 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 in 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 he had to do with his own subjective experiences through the unplanned dramatizations.

In addition, 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 s. XX. Although the father of psychodrama rejected many of the assumptions of Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis had a marked influence on his thinking, as we will see. In the same way, he experimented with a type of intervention that could be considered a primitive form of mutual help 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 extolled the role of improvisation. After dedicating a good part 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 goals it is trying to achieve, let's first review its appearances: the way in which one of its sessions unfolds. To understand minimally what we will see next, 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 the presence of many people is used to intervene in the problems of individuals, for shifts.

A) Yes, 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 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. Heating

In the first phase of the psychodrama session, a group of people get together and the person who energizes the act encourages the others to do exercises to break the ice. The objective of the warm-up is to make people uninhibited, become aware of the beginning of the session and are more predisposed 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 this she explains a little what problem has made her attend the session and what is the autobiographical background that is associated with it. The person leading the session tries to make the protagonist of the role-play phase explain the way in which you perceive this problem in the present, rather than trying to make you remember exactly the details of the same.

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 all improvise scenes related to the problem to try. 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; we'll see why later.

3. Group echo

In the last phase, tAll the people involved in the representation explain what they have felt, the way in which the performance has made them recall 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 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 the person understands himself better after having experienced a work that represents a series of facts. 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 represents a process of emotional liberation.

For Jacob Levy Moreno, the idea behind the therapeutic potential of psychodrama was that it allowed catharsis to be went from being secondary, experienced by the viewer, to being an active catharsis, experienced by protagonists of dramatizations.

The Spontaneity-Creativity Theory

And why was this form of catharsis it was better? This idea was based on the Spontaneity-Creativity theory, according to which creative responses to unforeseen situations is the best mechanism to discover 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 analyze a problem must be broken through participation in unforeseen situations. In this way, the process of emotional liberation is born from a creative and spontaneous fact, something more significant for oneself than a fiction seen from outside the work. For this creative catharsis to take place, it is not necessary to reproduce past experiences with exactitude, but rather to make the session evokes elements that in the present the protagonist believes are significant and are related to the conflict try.

The relationship between psychodrama and psychoanalysis

The link between the psychodrama of Jacob Levy Moreno and the psychoanalytic current is based, among others things, in the implication that there is an unconscious instance of people's minds, and another aware.

Some problems are fixed in the unconscious part, causing the conscious part to suffer the symptoms of this without being able to access its origin. That is why the problems that are tried to be addressed from 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 part The conscious wants the symptoms that the unconscious attempts to express what it contains to disappear.

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

Psychoanalysis also pursued the objective that blocked experiences emerged to 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 whole body through movements that are performed during role playing on stage.

The efficacy of psychodrama

Psychodrama is not part of the therapeutic proposals that have scientifically proven efficacy, which makes the skeptical community in health psychology 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 is based today.

To some extent, psychodrama focuses so much on subjective experiences and self-signification processes that it is said that your 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 to be treated.

This does not mean that psychodrama continues to be practiced, as is the case with family constellations, whose sessions may 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, for example, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.