The terminology group therapy was coined by the romanian doctor-psychiatrist Jacob Levi Moreno who in 1911 created the technique of psychodrama. This form of psychotherapy is based on an output from the individual to the treatment groups, leading to greater involvement of the verbal account, spontaneity, creativity and drama as the main axes of psychotherapy.
The method is based on dramatic techniques and representation, spontaneous theater and action-oriented. Thus it is achieved enhance personal growth and learning social skills and life. It tends to be a fast, powerful and short program which allows be a very currently used psychotherapy. It serves for both diagnostic and treatment.
Moreno’s interest is to offer the patient a stage where it can solve their problems with the help of therapeutic actors.
Objectives of psychodrama
The main objective of psychodrama is incorrect catharsis roles and creating new suitable roles. The release of the conflicts that disrupt mentally free from psychological meanings that have been created for certain episodes and disturb the mind, people have pathological conditions that have assumed roles that are incorrect or highly incorrect and distort the personal and social functioning.
Therapeutic goals:
- Realize one’s thoughts, feelings, motivations, behaviors and relationships.
- Improve understanding of situations, viewpoints of others, our own image or actions we take or make on them.
- Investigate and discover new answers, and therefore the possibility and one’s ability to choose new and more functional behavioral options.
- Rehearse, learn or prepare to act behaviors or responses that were found most convenient.
Elements of psychodrama
Within the psychodrama session are the following:
- Protagonist: the patient who chooses to dramatize the issue and who plays the lead role.
- Director: the psychotherapist who runs the session.
- Auxiliary: one or more auxiliary, which can be supportive and other therapists who play supporting roles.
- Public: to help the protagonist acting as a sounding board with its manifestations.
- Scenario: I appropriate the client, where you can expresrarse freely.
Phases psychodrama session
Three different times during the session:
- Heating or warming: It is essential to heat or warm the group, the psychodrama director and the protagonist. The effectiveness of the session depends largely on it.
- Performance or dramatization: The heating ends when the director has selected a star of the group and directs the center of the room to begin the psychodrama action. It makes a brief interview focused on the “here and now” in order to reach the conflict or major conflicts of the protagonist. Depending on the type of conflict more or less emotionally charged scene is done, and usually takes a small step for some previous moment in the life of the protagonist, when events took place today become conflicts. Thus, in the psychodrama action is achieved intervene both past and present, focusing mainly on the latter because it is on the current view of the protagonist where the director has more interest in intervening.
- Share or group eco: Also called “participation” for an understanding of the actions taken. In it, the group members they share those feelings, memories or experiences that have come to mind after the skit performed.
Techniques used in psychodrama
- Changing roles: Act from the point of view of other roles.
- Role reversal is one of the techniques of role reversal that is used during the skit, the role performs one of the yoes auxiliaries is now performed by the subject, and the interlocutor, the auxiliary ego takes the role performed until then the subject. Thus we facilitate compression of the other views.
- Assume certain roles to represent and understand the meanings and feelings of other roles: the son, the father, dead people, persona non grata, or ungrateful for the protagonist, etc.
In short, what it is is to represent certain roles or situations that make better understand both the protagonist and the public the different types of human relationships that exist, to improve them or overcome them.
