ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how Moreno’s philosophical and psychological investigations led to the design of psychodrama, which in turn would revive the spontaneous man. Moreno believed that he was successful in articulating a methodology that presents a new and complete perspective on man, one that highlights the main principles of existential psychotherapy. He saw in psychodrama and sociometry bridges between existential phenomenology and empirical science.
For Moreno, psychodrama was a therapeutic model for life, through which it would be possible to rectify insufficient behavior. Psychodrama represents the first organized application of the dramatic act for solving interpersonal problems and for the growth of individual or group consciousness. The events are taken from real life, but are understood in dramatic terms, as life-drama. Moreno’s concept is accompanied by the notion of communication, to which dramaturgy eventually leads us. Interpersonal communication in itself is the art of encounter, which is the core of psychodrama. In real life, the encounter is possible only on the symbolic and intellectual levels.
Moreno’s mission was to generate an encounter on the psychodrama stage as a continuous component of life itself in the most concrete and actual manner.
