ABSTRACT
As we already mentioned in the Introduction, the first formulation of the idea of therapeutic group springs from the experience of Moreno. Since being a student, Moreno practised with groups of people; he worked with children, prostitutes and First World War refugees in contexts that we would nowadays call social work, beginning to study the interaction networks that are active in groups. But the first formulations of the principle that the group can be a tool to facilitate the processes of change, clarification and growth typical of psychotherapy came after experiments in impromptu theatre (Steigreiftheater). The legend tells that the startling intuition (comparable to Newton’s apple or Archimedes’s tub) that gave birth to the practice and, later, to the theoretical modelling of psychodrama, came about with the famous ‘case of Barbara’.2 Reflecting upon this episode, Moreno was the first to consider deeply the transformative flows between life and theatre, between dramatic reality and everyday reality. It is known that Moreno, after many experiments and changes, got to a model of psychodrama that he defined as confessional, in which a protagonist is encouraged to expose ‘with frankness’ his/her own problems and to stage them. In this formulation, Moreno goes far beyond the first intuition, in which the process of transformation is triggered by the relationship with an imaginative role, and he draws near to the abreaction method of early psychoanalysis, a discipline he had previously
considered with some distrust. The concept of abreaction is very similar to Moreno’s concept of catharsis; both include the sense of a liberating emotional release.
