| Whisker, Craig |
Tauhara Encounter: Reflections on a Residential Psychodrama Group Session (PDF, 129.8 KB) |
Journal 31 December 2022 |
audience, auxiliary, auxiliary ego, creativity, director, doubling, encounter, mirroring, Moreno, production, protagonist, Psychodrama, psychotherapy, reflections, relationship, role, role reversal, sharing, spontaneity, tele, warm up |
Since 2013 I have co-led with either Marian Hammond or Selina Reid, and have twice led by myself, an annual winter residential psychodrama retreat at the Tauhara Retreat Centre located above Acacia Bay on Taupō-nui-a-Tia, Lake Taupō near the centre of Te Ika-o-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. On each occasion I write copious notes describing workshop sessions and my initial analyses and reflections on them and I jot down insights from between-session or end-of-day discussions with my co-leader. The process of writing while memories and impressions are still fresh captures what in days, even hours, may be unrecoverable. When I warm up to re-entering the stream of consciousness I had during the session I often perceive more than I did when in the group. These are unpolished perceptions. They include wonderings or conflicts that I form into questions or pose as contrasting points of view and they sometimes cause fragments of associative thought to surface from deep within my psyche, or a new perspective to suddenly appear like the bright green tip of a spring bud. |
8 |
2022-12 |
| Brown, Hamish |
Directing Psychodrama on Stage (PDF, 143.4 KB) |
Journal 29 December 2020 |
director, encounter, humanity, love, photography, protagonist, Psychodrama, role |
It is 10 am. I am sitting at the edge of a horse shoe of 8 chairs on the stage of the dilapidated Crystal Palace Theatre in Mt Eden. It is freezing and a vast blackness stretches upwards and beyond the first few rows of chairs that I can make out. I draw my attention down and into the group, I take in the stage lights set up around the group, the lighting technician adjusting things at the edge of the circle, Yvonne looking on with her camera. Now I can see the people in the group I will be working with, some I know well and we exchange easy smiles, others are new to me and new to the psychodrama method, sent along by enthusiastic friends to a free workshop. Briefly, I get anxious as I consider their experience, this must seem crazy to them, to be sitting in this place among all of this. |
6 |
2020-12 |
| Knottenbelt, Hilde |
A Place to Meet: Reflections on Group Improvisational Processes on Zoom (PDF, 882.1 KB) |
Journal 29 December 2020 |
creativity, director, German, J L Moreno, Moreno, poetry, protagonist, Psychodrama, spontaneity, warm-up |
Introduction It’s been a month since I worked face-to-face. The studio is looking decidedly casual. It’s become a place to hang out rather than a place to work. In the first weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, as I considered what my working life might look like in the next while, the word ersatz came to me. It’s a term borrowed from the German language meaning replacement, substitute, imitation, fake. In WW1 and WW2 ersatzbrot (substitute bread) was made with potato starch and sawdust and fed to prisoners who starved of malnourishment. I don’t want to create ersatz anything. |
3 |
2020-12 |
| Kaur, Baljit |
Exploring the therapeutic potential of skilled auxiliary work (PDF, 70.3 KB) |
Journal 15 December 2006 |
auxiliary, protagonist |
Auxiliary work in any group has the potential of letting members see differently either off the psychodrama stage or the interactions within the group. Auxiliary work when undertaken in accordance with the considerations is a highly skilled act with therapeutic potential for the protagonist. |
5 |
2006-12 |
| Watersong, Ali |
Surplus Reality: The Magic Ingredient in Psychodrama (PDF, 84.0 KB) |
Journal 20 December 2011 |
as if, auxiliary ego, concretisation, imagination, locus nascendi, maximisation, neuroscience, protagonist, role reversal, social atom repair, spontaneity, status nascendi, surplus reality, systems theory, unconscious |
Anything that can be imagined can be created on the psychodramatic stage. This is the magic that makes surplus reality a central aspect and powerful tool of Dr. J.L. Moreno's psychodrama method. Through surplus reality a person is able to enter the unknown, live out their fantasies and become the creator of their own life. Using psychodramatic work as illustration, Ali Watersong demonstrates the way that surplus reality facilitates the development of spontaneity, brings about social atom repair and assists in the formation of a positive identity. |
11 |
2011-12 |
