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Introduction to Psychodrama from Marlo Archer
I was in a family feud over money and needed some advice. I invited my dad to have a talk with me about it on a picnic table near Lake Michigan at the Summerfest grounds, under the Hoan Bridge on a bright, sunny day in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He told me I didn’t need to worry about what my aunt and uncle thought, and he knew I’d make the right decision. We spoke of other things as well. We laughed and cried as I caught him up on everything that had happened in my life since he had died. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that my dad is gone?
Concretisation - that peculair thing that psychodrama does so well.
Concretisation gives size and form to concepts, feelings and situations. Internal experiences are given symbolic form by choosing an object to represent a feeling, relationship or situation and placing it on the stage, or drawing it on paper.
Ave Creatore
AVE CREATORE
J.L. Moreno1
The most radical right wing deists and the most radical left wing agnostics and atheists have attributed various positive and negative qualities to the Supreme Universal Intelligence, and God has been both affirmed and denied in all the categories of these qualities, of being, of essence, of substance, of personality, of ruler, of all might, of all goodness, of all wisdom, of holiness, of righteousness, as spirit of progress and revolution.
When is a self not a self - when it is a role.
Moreno developed his ideas about role theory and they significantly influence how psychodrama is enacted and produced. Role theory suggests that the idea that we an authentic self, an inner self, is simply an idea we have inherited from our culture and does notmstand up to close scrutiny. In this extract from Bernie Neville's book Educating Psyche, Neville discusses Moreno's ideas about roles, psyche, identity, sel;f, and such things in a lively and illustrative manner.
Happiness and how to get it!
This is a neat little TED talk that highlights, once again, that we do not necessarily know ourselves as well as we might think. From a psychodramatic point of view the talk reminds one that warm-up is more important than having stuff. A warm-up that leads to feeling satisfied beats having everything and a warm-up to perfectionism or wanting more. And other minor things such as 'having' is very different from 'being'.
Learning to learn means learning to fail!
The world is changing much more rapidly than most people realize, says business educator Eddie Obeng -- and creative output cannot keep up. Eddie has fun with his audience and points out that learning is falling behind changes to our organisations. Psychodama and sociodrama are remarkable technologies of learning and can really help in these complex times. What do you think?
Our bodies change our minds!
Amy Cuddy starts by asking us to pay attention to what we’re doing with our bodies. Are our shoulders hunched? Are we trying to not bump into the person next to us? Are we sprawled out? She encourages us to notice how our non-verbals effect us! She points to research that the body language of others effects us immediately. This is relevant to psychodrama because we often work extensively with body language, reshaping body posture, and experimenting with body movement as a warm-up trigger for new roles.
The Social Trichotomy
The Social Trichotomy
It is of heuristic value to differentiate the social universe into three tendencies or dimensions, the external society, the sociometric matrix and the social reality. By external society I mean all tangible and visible groupings, large or small, formal or informal, of which human society consists. By the sociometric matrix I mean all sociometric structures invisible to the macroscopic eye but which become visible through the sociometric process of analysis. By social reality I mean the dynamic synthesis and interpenetration of the two.
A word picture of psychodrama in action
This is a chapter of a book called “Too good to last: The death of a caring culture” Written by Dr Robert Crawford and reprinted here with his kind permission. There are a number of Maori words and you may need to search on google if they are not familiar though often the context will give them their meaning as well. This example is taken from the vast stores of Robert’s experiences. The patient’s are not real though the examples are. Details have been altered enough to make them indistinct and keep the anonymity of actual patients secure.
