Adam Blatner

When I was young and watching television before there were blogs to eat up my time, they had these infomercials that advertised kitchen gadgets. Their enthusiastic pronouncements (as the title of this piece suggests) reminds me that psychodrama might well be thought of as a complex of ideas and techniques that can be creatively applied in all sorts of ways. Don’t think of it as a separate type of therapy exclusive of or competing with others. Rather, it’s like introducing electric power tools to a carpenter in the 1940s. Good judgment is still needed, but lots of work is eased and speeded up.

Psychodramatic techniques call upon the powers of imagination and intuition, the power of the body and a deeper level of involvement. The goal of creativity adds to the effectiveness, and many other advantages apply, also. Indeed, learning the techniques teaches people to be aware that one CAN use these techniques—on their own, apart from a psychodrama—in learning to maneuver among one’s own thoughts.

And just as you can buy woodworking tools to do all sorts of things—home repairs, big jobs, small craft projects—so too you can creatively adapt these techniques to help you maneuver psycho-socially. The techniques of role playing plus the language is truly “user-friendly.” Roles are to life what notes are to music, and as one of the verses to “Do, Re, Mi,”—a song in the Broadway musical, The Sound of Music, goes:     "When you  know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything."