DRAMA APPROACHES

There are three approaches here to be considered: psychodrama, dramatherapy and theatre games. Of these, psychodrama is the most important for a humanistic point of view.

Psychodrama was developed by Jacob Moreno in Vienna during the 1920s. Moreno came to America in 1925, ahead of the main rush, and set up a psychodrama school in New York. When the great development of group work in humanistic psychology came along in the 1960s, it lit upon psychodrama as one of the main means of carrying out its aims, From being ignored and even ridiculed for much of his life, Moreno saw his work taken up and used more than ever before. But he died in 1974 at the age of 85, too soon to see the further expansion which took place in the 1970s.

In psychodrama you take a life situation which is loaded with feeling for you - a row with the boss, being ill-treated as a child, a problem with a partyner, anything at all - and act it out, using people from the group as characters in your play. The group leader is called a director, and facilitates the action by suggesting ways of making it more direct and intense. The director will set up the scene in a concrete way ("so the door is over here, the window is here, and there is a table in the middle...") to make the scene as evocative as possible.

After the scene has been going along for a while, the director may suggest role reversal; that is, the person who has initiated the piece of work (the protagonist) changes places with the person who was being talked to. This is sometimes quite revelatory in itself.

Something else that may happen is that a member of the group may feel that the protagonist is not saying what they really mean. The group member may then go up behind the protagonist and talk on his or her behalf. The protagonist, if agreeing that that is the real thought, repeats it; or has the option of saying - "No, that's not right".

There are over 200 different techniques which may be used in psychodrama, and it has often been remarked that anyone who wants to make a name by inventing new group techniques runs up against the Moreno problem - that Moreno probably invented it first.

Psychodrama is one of the best-developed group methods in humanistic psychology, and it has training courses, certification and all the other features of mature organization. It is virtually impossible to go to a psychodrama group and not learn something useful.

In a psychodrama group, the individual piece of work carries on until some resolution, often of a cathartic kind, is carried out. The other participants are asked about their reactions to what has been happening, and often someone whose feelings have been stirred up will step forward and do their own piece of work.

Often there is a definite shape to each episode, such that there is a period of entry and slow build-up, followed by a rapid rise of energy and cathartic resolution, and then a period of digestion and relaxation. Psychodrama is a very free-flowing discipline, where the direector has to be very active throughout. It makes quite heavy demands upon all the participants to be active and involved.

In drama therapy the same is true, but here the emphasis is more on relationships within the group, rather than on individual experiences outside the group. This means that the group becomes very much a unity as time goes on.

The group's activities are relatively unstructured, and each person's interpersonal style emerges in relation to the stimulation of others in the group. The therapist's role is to help the group develop ways of examining and dealing with group problems as they arise.

The individual's recurring patterns of behaviour emerge in the role playing, and the therapist can help him or her to become more aware of these patterns, and then to experiment with changing them. Props and costumes may be used to make the action more vivid and direct.

In Britain, Sue Jennings and John Hudson have been active in pursuing drama therapy, and have published several accounts of it.

Finally, in theatre games we use many methods originally devleopied in the training of actors, by people such as Anna Halprin and Viola Spolin, for therapeutic purposes. Often they are excellent methods of stirring up certain emotional issues and enabling attention to be paid to them. So for example we might say that the relationship of master and slave is very relevant to life in various ways. Two people are assigned to the roles, and then they play out their scene in their own way. At the end, they say what they have learned, and other people in the group give their responses.

There are thousands of variations upon this general approach - setting roles, carrying them out and seeing what happens - and this means that theatre games are a very flexible way of working. They can be combined with encounter or psychodrama in many different ways. They can be extremely basic - "Look in to someone else's eyes for ten minues" - or extremely complicated - "managers over here, workers over there, government over there and shareholders in the other corner."

But when it comes to going deeply into just one thing, where one person can get some resolution to a deep-seated problem, we have to come back to psychodrama. In psychodrama we have all the flexibility of theatre games, all the group quality (what Moreno called 'tele') of drama therapy and in addition the ability to push right through into unconscious material if that is what the person needs. We all have to acknowledge the enormous contribution which Moreno made to the active and adventurous ways of working which we like so much in humanistic psychology.

BOOKLIST

Badaines, Ari (1988) 'Psychodrama' in J Rowan & W Dryden (eds) Innovative therapy in Britain Open University Press, Milton Keynes. Excellent chapter on working in a one-to-one way.

Blatner, A & Blatner A (1988) Foundations of psychodrama Springer, New York. Probably the best single book on psychodrama.

Brazier, David (1991) A guide to psychodrama Association for Humanistic Psychology, London. Excellent brief account of what it is and does.

Dayton, Tian (1994) The drama within: Psychodrame and experiential therapy Health Communications, Deerfield Beach. A big complete rundown on all aspects.

Gale, Derek (1990) What is psychodrama? Gale Centre Publications, Loughton. A personal and practical guide, readable and well presented.

Holmes, Paul & Karp, Marcia (eds)(1991) Psychodrama: Inspiration and technique Tavistock/Routledge, London. A good book of papers on working with different group populations.

Holmes, Paul, Karp, Marcia & Watson, Michael (eds)(1994) Psychodrama since Moreno Routledge, London. A set of twelve chapters by different authors - excellent.

Jennings, Sue (ed)(1988) Dramatherapy: Theory and practice for teachers and clinicians Routledge, London. An anthology of writings on dramatherapy by practitioners.

Marineau, Rene (1989) Jacob Levy Moreno 1889-1974 Tavistock/Routledge, London. A good biography.

Yablonsky, Lewis (1981) Psychodrama Gardner Press, New York. One of the best books on psychodrama, with much interesting material.