Adam Blatner

This blog poet also might be titled “Psychodrama Beyond the Medical Model.” Psychodrama is mostly used as psychotherapy, but a sizable component does not require the medical model! While psychodrama as psychotherapy is being squeezed out by evidence-based medicine, let’s let Moreno’s work find new life as “creativity expansion” or “action explorations.” This opens to a re-invigorating of sociodrama and applied sociometry in non-clinical  contexts.

This insight coincides with the efforts of the bean-counters to marginalize not only psychodrama, but many if not most of the psychotherapeutic approaches that proliferated in the 1960s-1980s. The trouble with their approach, of course, is that they include results of testing or assessment of populations many of whom don’t really want to look at—much less change—themselves.

This is a substantial number who perceive the source of our troubles to be outside themselves. These are the people who voted for Trump as a radical savior, an outsider. (Similarities to the election that brought Hitler to power in Germany around 1930 are lost to these folks. And it’s not the Jews who are the problem, but the “losers”—and Muslims.)

Back to psychotherapy evaluations: Many if not most folks don’t want it. Some— also known as the “cultural creatives”— realize that change in the world arises from change in the minds of people. They do want personal transformation, mind-change.But mind-change requires an escalation to doubting the mind of the collective (tribe), and realizing that the mind is vulnerable to self-deception. Many—perhaps most—people are by no means there!

Back to psychodrama beyond the clinical. As the medical model keeps getting more expensive, increasing number seek growth beyond the boundaries of “therapy.” Nor does the “encounter group” of the mid-1960s to mid-‘80s do the job. Psycho-social inquiry takes many paths.

One path, for example, is the eclectic or inclusive spiritual, a path that recognizes that spirituality involves change and transformation in many ways. It is complex —it requires more than merely accepting Jesus into one’s heart, or submitting to the faith of Islam, etc. It’s a life process of continual education. This in turn confronts a culture in which one has traditionally been considered “grown up” at age 21, whereas those who have lived vitally for four times longer realize that one only begins the second of many phases of the life journey at that point.

Circling back to action explorations, psychodrama, and more specifically, group introspection for personal and spiritual growth, one can perceive how methods synergize personal growth for those who want to grow. (It is useful to realize that many do not realize that they even need to grow emotionally or philosophically.)  We live in an era of paradigm shifts!