One of the most effective and interesting methods of group psychotherapy is psychodrama. Many people mistakenly believe that this technique is akin to a theater lesson, however, this is not entirely true. Psychodrama is a role-playing of significant events, during which the necessary conditions are created for the spontaneous expression of feelings. The term "psychodrama" is derived from two Greek words psyche - soul and drama - action.
Psychodrama, as a method of psychotherapy, is built on the study and analysis of actions under the guidance of an experienced psychotherapist to solve a wide range of psychological problems, both in adults and children.
The foundations of psychodrama were laid by Jacob Moreno in the 20s of the 20th century. What positively distinguishes this method from classical psychotherapy is that it is much more effective in helping people who have difficulty describing their feelings and emotions to open up.
The purpose of psychodrama is to work out both the internal problems of the individual and his relationship with the social environment (sociodrama). An interesting fact is that from the very beginning, psychodrama and sociodrama were successfully used by teachers to solve problems in children's groups, which confirmed the safety and wide possibilities of the technique - from developing creative abilities to resolving complex internal emotional conflicts.
Warming up
Warming up has several important specific purposes:
- Promotes spontaneity and creative activity among group members. Moreno paid special attention to the fact that psychodrama created all the conditions for the development and use of the personal potential of each person (both any group member and the director).
- Facilitates communication between participants, increasing the feeling of trust and belonging to the group through various techniques that help improve interaction and mutual understanding between all group members (for example, getting to know each other, sharing some life experiences, physical activity, which may include various types of tactile contact or nonverbal communication). The warm-up process enhances group cohesion while giving each person an opportunity to gain insight into the strengths and characteristics of the rest of the group.
An experienced director has a large repertoire of warm-up techniques. However, the director can (using his creativity) develop new techniques that may be particularly useful in the group with which he is currently working.
Techniques for conducting psychodrama
Psychodrama is a unique tool because it includes a huge number of techniques developed for a wide variety of situations. The basic techniques of psychodrama were described in detail by the wife of Jacob Moreno.
There are also key techniques that are suitable for most situations, which can be combined and adjusted by experienced specialists of the Alliance Center for the specific situation of each client:
- monologue technique;
- self-presentation technique;
- double technique.
The psychodrama procedure includes
- warm-up stage (choice of topic, group mood, distribution of roles);
- stage of action (in accordance with the technique recommended by the leader);
- sharing stage (exchange of emotions between participants).
The psychodrama method, carried out at the Alliance Center for Medical Treatment, has an unlimited range of applications: from the formation and development of unique personal qualities to serious psychotherapeutic work in case of clinical problems. The results of work, including with family relationships, treatment of addictions, building effective social relationships, show the best results. We are proud that we can offer our clients the best psychodrama specialists with full psychotherapeutic education.
Specialists
Ilyina Elena Anatolyevna
Family psychologist, Gestalt therapist
more than 5 years of experience
1 positive review
- Family psychotherapy
- Gestalt therapy
- Psychodrama
- Group psychotherapy
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Protagonist choice
Typically, at the end of the warm-up, one or more participants will clarify issues (with varying degrees of confidence and focus) that they would like to explore in some way during the session. At this important decision point regarding the choice of the role of the protagonist (translated from Greek as “leading (or first) actor”, “prima”), participants should be supported. Then follows the selection of one of the contenders for this role. Sometimes it is completely clear which of them is the main contender (one of the candidates, in terms of their emotional state, is more suitable for this role than the others), but it may also happen that several people are quite warmed up. Then, using special techniques, the director and the group select one protagonist for the current session (group members can vote for one or another candidate, the applicants can decide among themselves which of them needs personal work more at the moment, the director himself can choose a participant who, in his opinion, currently fits this role better than others). Regardless of how the protagonist is chosen, it is very important that he receives the approval and support of the group.
Methodology "Psychodrama" for studying family relationships
Psychodrama
"Family Sculpture"
Instructions:
“This technique allows you to feel what it means to be a member of a family. And it can be easier to show than to tell. Now one of you, the bravest one, will “show” the intra-family relationships of YOUR family. You yourself will act as family members.” The first participant is selected - a sculptor who will choose his family members from you.
Chooses...
The “arrangement” of family members can be done by a psychologist or presenter, but a more effective option is when the person who has discovered the problem takes the active position of the “sculptor”. Ideally, it would be great for everyone to experience the role of a sculpture, but unfortunately our time is limited.
Now, you sculptor, I suggest treating other family members as if they were made of clay. That is, you must put them in a position that would reflect the attitude in this family. The sculpting continues until the sculptor is satisfied with his result. Then, for each family member, you need to come up with a word or phrase that best describes that person's behavior. Family members must say these phrases in sequence.
Family Sculpture involves three basic steps
Step 1
. Taking on game roles
The sculptor sculpts certain family members from the group members, gives them certain poses, and places them at a certain distance from each other. Participants remain in these poses for one to two minutes. We take a picture of this family. During this time, they should feel what sensations, feelings and emotions they have: what they see while in this position; which figures are close or far away
I will then ask the participants if they are comfortable in the role they are playing. If not, I suggest changing anything until the result suits everyone, if possible. Then we take another photo.
Let's discuss.
Main questions to discuss:
- “Come up with a title for your work”;
- to each family member: “How do you feel in this place among your relatives?”;
- to the whole family: “ Did this sculpture surprise you?”;
- to each family member: “Did you know before that the sculptor perceives you the way he depicted it?”;
- to the entire family: “Do you agree that your family functions exactly as depicted in the sculpture?”
- to the sculptor or family: “What changes would you like to see in the life of the family?”
This technique is used to work with any family whose members can communicate verbally. Used to study family structure, roles, communications and intrafamily relationships. Based on this technique, it is possible to analyze the influence of a family’s past on its present. This technique encourages family members to question family myths, rules, belief systems and the roles they play. The technique is used to diagnose and correct family relationships.
Dramatic action
Now comes the time for dramatic action, when the protagonist (with the support of the director) explores the problems that became clear to him during the warm-up process. There is no pre-written script for directing a drama; At every moment of dramatic action, the spontaneous creativity of the protagonist, supporting persons and director is manifested. As a rule, this stage of the psychodramatic process begins with the protagonist, together with the director, clarifying and clarifying the topic that they are going to explore. Outwardly, this conversation between them resembles the conclusion of a contract. The protagonist's first words should be listened to very carefully (for example: “I always have difficulty with men” or “During the warm-up, I was reminded of how upset I was last night after watching a TV show about sexual violence”). The "contract" between the protagonist and the director allows for the focus on a specific topic that can be explored during a given session.
At its core, psychodrama is a stage process, so the action quickly turns into drama. The protagonist and the director make a joint decision regarding the scene with which the drama will begin, and the protagonist, in accordance with his description, begins to build it (without the use of scenery).
The director encourages the protagonist to take action (replaying past events, the protagonist speaks in the present tense), determines which actors from the protagonist's immediate environment may be needed to enact this particular scene (i.e. parents, siblings, employees) and asks him to choose participants to all required participant support roles that best suit them.
However, the director has the opportunity (using his clinical experience) to move into the space of imaginary reality (“surplus reality”). In this space, events can unfold that have never happened and words can be heard that no one has ever heard before (for example, a person’s experience of maternal attention and care in the process of psychodramatic action, while his childhood years spent in the family were filled with pain and despair associated with parental tyranny), or there is a replay of situations that will never arise in the future (for example, when the protagonist talks to a father who died many years ago, or meets a person with whom there is no possibility of entering into closer relationships relationship.
At the final stage of psychodrama, the director can return the dramatic action to real relationships (to the scene where the events of today are played out), that is, to the beginning of the session. As a result of contact with strong feelings experienced sometime in the past, the protagonist gains more information about his own behavior, gleaning it from scenes of his past. This allows him to try new types of behavior and other options for getting out of the impasse in which his relationship has currently reached.
Principles of psychodrama
The author of the method himself identified the following basic principles of psychodrama:
- roles and role-playing games (participants choose the most important and relevant topic for everyone and distribute roles);
- spontaneity (psychodrama always follows an unintentional and unspecified scenario);
- body (the process of perceiving what is happening between all participants in the process);
- catharsis and insight (the patient’s awareness of his problem through the experiences of all participants).
Psychodrama, unlike theater, always takes place without a pre-planned script, and it is this emerging spontaneity that helps many patients as a result of psychodrama psychotherapy, including getting rid of internal pressures and the neuroses caused by them.
Child psychodrama is also becoming increasingly popular for the treatment of neurotic disorders in children, as well as for the development of creativity and social skills.
Schering
Sharing is the last stage of a psychodramatic group process, during which all group members are invited to share their feelings, as well as the similarities they notice about their experiences and life situations with the experiences and life experiences of the protagonist. It is very important that during the sharing process the participants do not “interpret” the problems revealed in the behavior and emotional state of the protagonist, who, of course, at this moment may turn out to be very vulnerable.
Based on materials from the book “Psychodrama: Inspiration and Techniques” by Paul Holmes
The emergence of sociometry
The origins of sociometry are rooted in experiences with refugees at the end of the First World War.
Moreno believes that there are two forces between people - attraction and repulsion, which manifest themselves as sympathy and antipathy. Observing how prosperous refugees shared their barracks with relatives, old and new friends, and how there was constant irritation and squabbles in the refugees’ huts, he saw how streams of sympathy and antipathy spread between people. Moreno comes to the conclusion that control over these forces could alleviate the plight of the people in the camp.
To study the operation of these forces, a sociometric test was created, which assumes that each group member can, according to a given criterion, select or reject group members.
Figure 1. Sociometry by J. Moreno. Author24 - online exchange of student work
An important condition for testing is the personal interest of group members in productive changes in the socio-emotional structure in which they are included.
This test can also be used as a diagnostic procedure itself, which is why it was developed in social psychology. The indicators are the number of choices and rejections made and received by participants, their intensity, reciprocity, stability, etc., expressed by sociometric individual and group indices.
Moreno considered the old sociological method unsuitable; he did not want to experiment with people as experimental animals. This suggested that the problem was not in the organization of the experiment, but in the reorganization of traditional research methods.
He transfers all participants in sociometric testing from the status of a research object to the status of an action researcher, therefore, motivated by their current social situation, they had to complete the test in their own interests. This was the only way to achieve consistency in the results of the study.
The result of this diagnosis is a sociogram, which displays the relationships between group members in graphical symbolic form. The image of each group member is symbolic - it can be a circle or triangle with a name or number inside.
Moreno in his ideas connects sociometry with the social atom, which he considers the smallest element of the structure of relationships. A specific individual acts as the center of the social atom, but, from his point of view, an isolated individual is a social fiction.
A person’s relationships with others are included in this social atom and at a certain moment are connected with it in emotional, cultural, business, and social terms. Not all of an individual’s acquaintances are included in the social atom, but only those who have crossed the “threshold of the social atom” due to the significance of the relationship. Also included are those who are related to the individual in a desired relationship.
The social atom is not constant; new people can appear in it and old ones can disappear due to circumstances. In this case, Moreno speaks of social dying, which can lead to painful consequences on the physical plane.
