Moreno's Contributions

[Adam Blatner]

Lest my lack of idealizing Moreno as all-knowing be viewed as a deficiency of piety, let 
me affirm that I profoundly respect his contributions---and Zerka's---and want to promote 
these as important tools that can be used in many fields. I've made this point to some 
colleagues and it occurred to me to list them: I think that most other fields either 
hardly know about these ideas or haven't found them yet persuasive enough to actively 
integrate them. Although I'd prefer that Moreno be given credit where credit is due---not 
just for its professionalism and historical veracity, but also to encourage those who find 
one tool useful to go check out the other ones!---the main emphasis is on getting these 
tools utilized.

1. Creativity is a key category to keep in mind, a value to be promoted, never more than 
what is needed today. Our education and for many, even religion, promotes a tendency to 
rely on what has already been created by others---Moreno called this the "cultural 
conserve"--- and certainly it is worthwhile to use this foundation---but not to RELY on it 
as adequate. The challenge is to dare to created. The fear of imagination, creativity, and 
the courage that it takes to live this way is pervasive in many cultures, and Moreno's 
attention to this theme is most important. In this he was almost a century ahead of his 
time.

2. That spontaneity, improvisation, experimentation, exploration, are key ways to be 
creative is also one of Moreno's greatest insights. Most folks try to be creative right 
off, try to be right the first time, and the lack of guarantees in any improvisation is 
for many daunting  Spontaneity requires a bit of courage, a willingness to fail.

3. The need for a fail-safe context, a laboratory of sorts, is needed to optimize 
experimentation: The context of play acts as a lubricant for the process.

4. Another lubricant is the sense of interpersonal trust in those around, audience, 
judges, etc. This is a first hint of what sociometry is potentially about: How can we 
create communities in which people can feel free to be spontaneous, improvise, 
explore---including exploring the interpersonal field itself, talk about relationships, 
feelings?

    (I want to say again that these concepts are hardly if at all taught in psychology 
classes, in the course of the average training of counselors or other people helpers---and 
yet I think that each of these could be an important addition, a necessary addition, to a 
holistic education of therapists, teachers, parents, and others!)

5. The co-opting of the methodology of drama has been another powerful contribution, as it 
in itself carries many advantages.
   5a. First of all, it's a natural laboratory for social and psychological explorations, 
a vehicle for numbers 1-4 above. I'm referring not to scripted, rehearsed drama to be done 
"correctly" for a paying audience, but rathre improvised drama as an interactive medium.
   5b. The use of role, scenes, rehearsal, taking parts of a scene over, standing back and 
watching how others might do it, taking suggestions from director and co-actors, the 
role-distance of the actor---all of these are powerful metaphors for learning to live more 
creatively. Even without doing formal psychodrama or even role playing, these elements in 
themselves are valuable tools.
    5c. As Moreno pointed out, action is a more holistic and evocative medium than mere 
narrative. Of course, talking about things is better than avoiding talking about 
them---yay dynamic psychology!--- but enactment cuts through some tendencies to be 
defensive through "talking about", and in other ways cuts through isolation of affect, 
rationalization, and other distancing maneuvers.
    5d. Enactment also involves the body, nonverbal communications, internal cue-ing from 
nonverbal communications, and all of these are rich, rich sources of ideas.

6. Drama in its larger sense has and can continue to be an inclusive activity that invites 
also the use of other arts as vehicles to non-rational experience---art, music, dance, 
drumming, movement, poetry, scripted drama, stories, myth, social issues (sociodrama), 
philosophical issues (axiodrama), and so forth.

7. Simple role training---not really all that classically psychodramatic, but rather the 
principle of rehearsal through action---should be far more widely practiced in education. 
Learning by doing recognizes the need of people to get a feel for what needs to be done, 
and to adapt behaviors to individualized styles of temperament, interest, learning style, 
etc.

8. Role playing for exploring problems and building social empowerment was recognized by 
Moreno decades before being used in a slightly different way by Boal and his Theatre of 
the Oppressed. The principle is similar, though:  Get warmed up to a problem, and invite 
the audience or group to offer their own hunches as to how something should be dealt with. 
No "right" answers are assumed to be known ahead of time. I want to see variations of this 
approach continue to expand as a form of relevant social action.

9. Moreno's Theatre of Spontaneity has scores of offshoots and linkages with other drama 
approaches, generating methods such as Playback Theatre, various types of sociodrama, 
various types of applied drama, etc. I think that psychodramatic concepts and methods 
could deepen and extend the use of the other approaches, and that social artists---those 
who apply Morenian approaches in various fields---might also benefit from the learning of 
non-Morenian approaches.

10. Sociometry should be recognized as a large complex of ideas and techniques, developed 
further regarding theory and practice. We should avoid treating it as a cultural conserve 
and hesitating to critique or amplify, build and revise what has already been written or 
done. It's great stuff in its essence and there's lots of room for advancement.
       10a. The idea of externalizing ambiguous experiences, group dynamics, and so forth 
by portraying them through techniques such as the spectrogram, the social atom, the 
local-gram, or through the placement of various small objects or figures---all hold great 
potential. They're good tools.
     10b. Helping people to become sensitive to the subtle pull and push of tele in their 
own lives is itself a useful goal. Such forms of tele tend to be overridden or ignored by 
many professionals, in part because they have little modeling or validation in knowing how 
to talk about telic dimensions of relationships.

11. Each of the psychodramatic techniques can be useful in various contexts---I think of 
them as power tools for carpentry when previously all carpenters had were hand tools. Good 
judgement still is needed in knowing when and how to use them. Often it is better not to 
use this or that technique---they are not in themselves cure-alls, panaceas. But with 
judgment, they amplify the potential that, used with wisdom, they can indeed be useful for 
many purposes.

12. The role concept offers the foundations for a relatively familiar, user-friendly 
language for talking about psycho-social problems in a practical way. I envision it also 
as a common language that can foster understanding among professionals in different 
disciplines and who have been affiliated with many schools of thought.

13. Of course, the idea of working with groups has taken off, but there continue to be 
refinements needed. Some groups could benefit from being less leader-centered, for 
example. Attention perhaps needs to be given to supporting group cohesion more than 
attending to the more "interesting" problem of the individual in the group, recognizing 
that when the whole system is stronger, certain problems tend to be more easily resolved. 
(Indeed, the capacity of some group members to deflect a group from its own development 
because of their ultimate victimhood---a game called "Why Don't You-Yes, But" by Eric 
Berne---can sabotage group development. The point here is that knowing how to think about 
and work with groups is no easy task.)
      13a. The idea of group work should not be confined to traditional therapy groups. 
Conjoint family therapy is a kind of group work. Group work should also be recognized as 
the practice of, say, including friends, neighbors, teachers, and others in an 
intervention for addiction, or to be helpful in other ways.

14. . . .

 . . . That's enough for now. I bet others can add their own views on how psychodrama 
offers concepts and tools for building an infrastructure of consciousness development.