| Maher, Jane |
Beauty and the Covid Beast (PDF, 115.0 KB) |
Journal 31 December 2022 |
beauty, creativity, health, internet, isolation, love, relationship, role, spontaneity, systems theory, vulnerability |
In this moment from ‘Beautiful World Where Are You’, Sally Rooney’s characters experience reunification, they embrace, after separation, conflict, breakdown and heart break. Beauty blossoms in their embrace. Embracing has been something that the Covid 19 Pandemic required us to curtail. Hugging, kissing, touching, proximity, gathering, all required more awareness, more planning; often constraint. At times the number of minutes we spent out of home were closely clocked, the distance from home and what we could go out for were prescribed. Likewise who we could be with. Mandated lockdowns, curfews, border closures, quarantining, masks, covid safety plans; all new ways of living imposed to mitigate a health crisis that might otherwise push through the pre-existing cracks and bring on total social collapse. In this context our priorities were naturally reviewed. Where do we find beauty amongst the unwelcome messes, fears, sorrows, losses; the burdens that discriminate unfairly. There have also been new possibilities. |
4 |
2022-12 |
| Simmons, Neil |
Moreno (Back) in the Doctors’ Surgery (PDF, 123.4 KB) |
Journal 31 December 2022 |
concretisation, creativity, health, mirroring, Moreno, patient, psychodramatic methods, relationship, role, social system, spontaneity, tele, warm up |
I am a creative being. As a child I was artistic. I was always making things; baskets, weaving, jewellery, drawings, paintings and furniture. Since deciding not to be a professional artist and to continue being a doctor, I have been on a quest to bring creative life to my medical work. In more recent years, psychodrama has been a companion in this quest. |
5 |
2022-12 |
| Rock, Cissy |
Embodying a Creative Revolution: A Sociodramatist at Work (PDF, 96.9 KB) |
Journal 31 December 2022 |
as if, community development, creativity, encounter, God, health, mirroring, Moreno, playback theatre, relationship, role, sociodrama, sociometry, spontaneity, systems theory, warm up |
This article explores Moreno’s notion of sociatry and the required creative revolution that involves everyone in the healing of society (Moreno, 1947). It will appeal to anyone wanting to work sociodramatically or wanting to get to know about Moreno’s concepts of sociatry and creative revolution. It is also relevant for anyone working with principles of social justice, equity, dignity, diversity and inclusion. |
7 |
2022-12 |
| 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 |
| Postlethwaite, Jenny |
There’s Lots of World Out There (PDF, 194.6 KB) |
Journal 30 December 2021 |
academic mentoring, coaching, creativity, human development, insight, J L Moreno, mentoring, metaphor, organisational culture, spontaneity, supervision |
Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space (Card, 1995); sparking our imagination, our creativity, our understanding; providing us a royal road of relating to situations and possibility. Here follows a scene from a classic musical. I invite you to warm up to the world of a developing psychodrama practitioner. Don their garb, enter into this scene, sense the role relations, experience the spontaneity, look for what truth, insight and inspiration it may offer for them. |
5 |
2021-12 |
| Heriot, Anna |
Three Ceremonies: Sociodrama In Situ (PDF, 152.2 KB) |
Journal 29 December 2020 |
ceremony, doubling, J L Moreno, mirroring, social atom repair, sociodrama, spontaneity |
Introduction: Integration of sociodrama into my being I respond somatically to completing my written and practice tasks for my final accreditation. Experiencing myself cellularly as enlivened and buoyed, I am able to sink down into the ocean of my life and work fearlessly, then bob up again, corklike, lightly and joyfully. My confidence, strangely, also feels unsinkable: another completely new experience. I remember Max Clayton looking at me in one memorable moment and saying, “You’re alright you know.” I heard him and believed him, but I didn’t feel it. Now I do. I begin to present myself as a sociodramatist, one who works with the whole group and different subgroups. I know I offer them, and they actively receive, something of real value. I feel the reverberations as I work. |
8 |
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 |
| Clark, Cushla |
Staging the Therapeutic Experience - Using Moreno’s psychodrama stage in parenting groups for women (PDF, 259.9 KB) |
Journal 28 December 2019 |
action space, audience, balcony, enactment, J L Moreno, levels, Moreno, Psychodrama, psychodrama stage, spontaneity, warm up, warm up step |
Moreno proposed the psychodrama stage as the first instrument of psychodrama. He designed it with four levels, the audience, the warm up step, the action space and the balcony, which mirror the stages of a protagonist’s warming up process. Providing illustrations focused on the use of the warm up level or step and the balcony in parenting groups for women, Cushla Clark proposes that a psychodramatist who maintains consciousness of the structure of the Morenian stage, including improvising the different levels when physical constraints are present, is able to enhance a protagonist’s warm up to spontaneity and produce a full and satisfying dramatic enactment. This article is drawn from Cushla’s AANZPA thesis, Liberation via The Stage. |
5 |
2019-12 |
| Postlethwaite, Jenny |
From Rational to Relational - Reflections on embracing a psychodramatic approach in academic mentoring (PDF, 202.9 KB) |
Journal 28 December 2019 |
academic mentoring, conserved cultures, mentoring, Psychodrama, relational, spontaneity, university mentoring, vulnerability |
Many practitioners working in organisations will find themselves facing the challenge of heavily conserved systems and cultures. What might be the effect of embracing a psychodramatic approach in such contexts? Through the lens of a long running mentoring programme in two Australian universities, this article identifies the experience for the participating academics as novel and impactful, providing them with a springboard to develop and integrate a new relational capacity into their rational world. The positive effect is felt and seen within individual mentoring relationships and beyond, sparking spontaneity capable of shifting the wider university paradigm. |
4 |
2019-12 |
| Logeman, Walter |
Encounter - The heart of psychodramatic couple therapy (PDF, 183.1 KB) |
Journal 28 December 2019 |
begegnung, couple therapy, doubling, encounter, J L Moreno, love, mirroring, Moreno, natural groups, Psychodrama, relationship, role reversal, spontaneity, synthetic groups, tele |
This article is concerned with the application of psychodrama principles and practices to couple therapy. In particular, it explores Moreno’s philosophy of encounter, that meeting of two, ‘face to face and eye to eye’, which lies at the heart of psychodramatic couple therapy. Drawing on illustrative material, the author shows the way in which the psychodrama structure of warm up, action and sharing apply in a couple therapy session, with the encounter presenting as the action phase. He also describes the psychodramatic techniques of doubling, mirroring and role reversal as they are used to facilitate the encounter. |
3 |
2019-12 |
| McVea, Charmaine |
Spontaneity or Emotion as the Catalyst for Change - Corrective experiences in psychodrama (PDF, 320.2 KB) |
Journal 28 December 2019 |
action insight, corrective experience, emotion, emotion-focused therapy (EFT), Greenberg, J L Moreno, Moreno, Psychodrama, psychotherapy integration, research, social atom repair, spontaneity, transformation |
Corrective experiences are a common factor in effective therapies, often having profound transformative effects. While Greenberg proposes that the activation and processing of emotions produces corrective experiences, Moreno emphasises spontaneity as the therapeutic agent or catalyst of change. Drawing on research, Charmaine McVea argues for the greater efficacy of spontaneity. She proposes that spontaneity not only constitutes an outcome of corrective experiences but also contributes to the emergence of those experiences, specifically through the development of action insight and corrective interpersonal experience during psychodrama enactments. |
2 |
2019-12 |
| Logeman, Walter |
Moreno's Scientific Methodology: By, Of and For the People (PDF, 324.3 KB) |
Journal 24 December 2015 |
experimental design, Moreno, principles of sociometry, Psychodrama, scientific methodology, social science, spontaneity |
This paper is an exposition of the scientific methodology developed by Jacob Levy Moreno. It is based on an extensive reading of his writing and the discovery that the heart of his philosophy includes a research paradigm that incorporates human spontaneity and unpredictability. Six principles have been identified and formed into a working description so that research may be by the people, of the people, and for the people. The paper invites a greater consciousness of this research methodology. The author hopes that practitioners of psychodramatic methods will be encouraged to apply it in their work. |
12 |
2015-12 |
| Reekie, Don |
Creative Genius: A Spark in a Cloud of Unknowing (PDF, 111.9 KB) |
Journal 22 December 2013 |
creative genius, creativity, creator, director, genius, protagonist surplus reality, Psychodrama, spontaneity, tele and telic |
This article presents the author's conviction and work showing that a psychodrama director learns to follow the protagonist/client and trust a wide range of interactive communications. Their full nature may be hidden from the director. The protagonist can be unconscious of specifics or relevance. The writer accepts many cognitive functions of the central nervous system happen at a speed making conscious consideration impossible. Learning is not only an intentional act but is built into our mind-body functioning. This paper posits that the instances described involve dynamic inter-play of S factor (spontaneity) and C factor (creativity) within the Morenean universe of discourse, and considers creative genius as an integrative quality common in human functioning |
13 |
2013-12 |
| Consedine, Mike |
Accessing Spontaneity in a Role Training Session (PDF, 62.7 KB) |
Journal 15 December 2006 |
role training, spontaneity |
Role training is a psychodramatic intervention where its structure provides greater emotional safety for participants. Role training in combination with small drama can release greater spontaneity among the participants. |
8 |
2006-12 |
| Howard, Katherine |
The Dance of Relationship: Using Moreno in Workplace Injury Rehabilitation (PDF, 90.2 KB) |
Journal 20 December 2011 |
coaching, creativity, cultural conserve, doubling, injury, mirroring, modelling, Moreno, Psychodrama, rehabilitation, role, role relationship, role reversal, role training, spontaneity, warm up, workplace |
Katherine Howard explores the use of Moreno's methods in what has become, in Morenian terms, a robotic workplace injury rehabilitation system. Presenting two case studies as illustration, she employs the metaphor of the dance of relationship to capture the way in which psychodramatic techniques transform difference and conflict into mutuality and cooperation, habitual coping roles into fluid and progressive functioning. This article is adapted from the author's 2010 Australian and New Zealand Psychodrama Association (ANZPA) accreditation thesis, Spontaneity and Creativity at Work: The Application of Morenian Methods in Workplace Injury Management. |
11 |
2011-12 |
| Browne, Rollo |
Psychodrama and Insight (PDF, 102.0 KB) |
Journal 22 December 2013 |
brain wave, catharsis, creativity, insight, intuition, spontaneity, warming up |
Insight in psychodrama occurs through the use of basic techniques such as concretisation, role reversal and mirroring. But it is not guaranteed. Drawing on research into the neuroscience of insight, the psychodramatist can explicitly focus on simple steps to maximize the possibility of insight: setting out the dilemma, shifting to a resting state and then bringing this state of being into contact with the presenting dilemma. |
13 |
2013-12 |
| O'Rourke, Patricia |
Integrating Infant Mental Health and Psychodrama Perspectives (PDF, 85.9 KB) |
Journal 15 December 2006 |
child development, infant mental health, spontaneity, warm-up |
Discusses Moreno's theories of child development, spontaneity and warm-up and the work of major infant mental health theorists. It draws a parallel between these theories and describes how these two bodies of work can strengthen therapeutic practice. |
1 |
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 |
