PSYCHODRAMA AND THEATRE
(from the book “The Power of Psychodrama”)
Thinking about a topic that can connect the concept of such a magazine* and the interest of its readers
with the psychotherapeutic concept, which with its very name evokes associations about the similarity
between the art scene and the Moreno’s therapeutic approach, the author of this text, to whom the
therapeutic vocation is much closer than that of acting, has felt the need to launch into the adventure
of trying to explain rationally the similarities and differences between these two processes that always
carry in themselves a greater part of the irrational.
At the very mention of psychodrama, the first associations for people with no experience of the
psychodrama process are connected to the theatre, actors and audiences, while the acting element is
imagined to be the basic therapeutic technique. Next in this line of suppositions is the notion that a
person progresses in the process of self-healing to final recovery by acting a certain part. It would be
interesting to linger on this position and analyze a deeper flow of the association chain and the origin of
the spontaneous faith in the healing power of theatre dynamics.
However, at this point it is much more important to first make a clear distinction that in the psychodramatic
as opposed to the dramatic process, the person (the protagonist) who enters that process with their own
problems and the drive to overcome them, stays in it and emerges from it in their own life role. With
sometimes long-lasting changes to their identity (when such changes are necessary) the protagonist
enters through the technique of role reversal into the roles of other important persons and objects in their
life and, as the burden of their own identity and notions of themselves are temporarily removed, starts to
feel the space, time and importance of emotional relations and messages in a completely different way
from usual, gaining newly awakened feelings, notions and a qualitative change in estimating him/herself,
others and reality.
It is important to mention here that this opens the door to spontaneity in learning to accept new roles
more feely, which allow expression through more adequate actions and creativity, enriching what had
been stereotyped patterns of behaviour and actions. The protagonist begins to replace rigidity with
life-play, to replace stereotypical behaviour with the joyfulness of free action. However, as distinct from
the actor, the protagonist on the stage during the psychodramatic process must soon return to their role,
to take up again the burden of his/her own identity and decision-making responsibilities of life importance,
to face the power of his/her own problems in the scenes that follow one after another, derived from the
experiential, as well as the world of fears and unsatisfied drives. S/he is deprived of the defence
mechanism of illusion that the events on the stage are happening to someone else and that s/he is only
temporarily in that other role. Thus s/he is faced with a fateful importance of human identity and a
burden of responsibility before him/herself and in front of others.
The roles of the director in the theatre and in psychodrama are fundamentally different. The psychodrama
director is an active person on the stage who, first of all, has the role of a therapist, but also of a director,
a critic and the audience at the same time. His/her intimate needs are peripheral—disregarded if
possible—while his/her capacity and ability for experiencing the drives and frustrations of the protagonist
and tuning these to reality determines the extent to which s/he succeeds in assessing the potential of the
protagonist’s personality.
It is important to note that certain temporary changes in the identity of the director’s personality are
necessary in order to adopt such a role during the psychodramatic process. These occur in a mobile play
of entering and exiting the protagonist’s identity with the aim of understanding the protagonist’s
intra-psychological happenings and then also in returning and shifting in various positions of his/her own
personality and acceptance of the role on the stage. Nevertheless, at every moment of the
psychodramatic process the director is obliged to exist with his/her manifoldness in the time and space
of the inner world of the protagonist, as well as to participate both in the world on the scene and external
reality.
It seems that acting in psychodrama is mostly represented in parts of its manifestation and action in the
form of what is called the auxiliary ego. Important characters from the life of the protagonist and
imaginary situations in which the protagonist has invested strong feelings and needs and in which they
have experienced strong frustrations, are brought to life during the psychodramatic process with the
participation of certain group members who are chosen by the protagonist and who frequently justify
this unconscious choice by possessing some features that are very close to the features of the persons
from the protagonist’s life. Taking part in such roles, they are trying with their acting to provoke as credibly
as possible the semblance of enactment of the authentic situation and thus challenge the feelings and
reactions of the protagonist that have remained unresolved till that moment which, with the power of its
tension and the potential of creating fear and restlessness, forced the protagonist’s personality to run to
the unsafe shelter of the role of an ill and suffering person.
In interpreting the role of the auxiliary ego, acting in psychodrama is aimed primarily at meeting the
needs of the protagonist and at the same time it is subjected to continuous assessment of its authenticity.
However, it is very important to highlight here that, after getting out of this role, the member of the group
carries with them awoken identifications, already known to him/her or experienced and noticed for the
first time, which are brought out to the group and shared with the protagonist in the next part of the
psychodrama—called sharing—after the completion of the staged part. Thus s/he shows acceptance of
these contents as his/her own and not as experiences that are only in connection with the other person.
The role and place of the audience in the theatre also differs greatly from that of the group
members/observers in psychodrama. In the theatre the audience is in the auditorium, consisting of more
or less interested individuals that in the scene dynamics find certain identifications with their own inner
dynamics and experiences and at the same time give an emotional tone to the play with their reactions
and thus reflect to the actors the degree of acceptance and estimation of the authenticity of the roles
and the content that is taking place on the scene. The applause after the play is again a nonverbal,
final sharing of the audience with the actors, and the edge of the stage, as well as the playing of other
people’s roles and not their own, remains there after the play to separate them.
The audience in psychodrama represents more an organism than a group of individuals. Persons and
objects are brought to life out of it, time and spaces are built, and conflicts are made and resolved on
the stage. At the same time it represents a booster of emotions and drives—a surrounding that is ready
to accept unconditionally all aspects of the protagonist’s personality as well as the reality with irrefutable
laws of survival.
Although we can find similarities in certain phases and phenomena of the psychodramatic process with
the art scene (theatre), if would be difficult to identify any kind of similarity between psychodrama’s
sharing and theatre events. Thus the conclusion can be drawn that sharing is a purely therapeutic, group
phenomenon in which the greater or lesser openings of the intimate worlds of the group members occur,
aroused by the events on the psychodramatic stage. There is also an unusually powerful and in many
ways unexplainable healing flow of verbal and nonverbal contents directed to all members of the group,
but first of all to the protagonist in gratitude for everything s/he has given.
Closing this small, comparative concept, the author of this text becomes aware that he is being
overwhelmed by strong feelings at the refreshed spectacle of the stage in his performances. It is a space
which can hold the fateful importance of a life choice, a place where successes and failure are
experienced and the time is being brought to life in your own roles as well as in the roles of others. It is
also a space where it is possible to end an old life and start a new one…
*This text was published in the magazine ’SCENA‘ (‘STAGE’), No.6, pp.65-67, Novi Sad, 1991
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