THE EXPERIENCE OF COMMUNITY IN THE PSYCHODRAMATIC TECHNIQUE OF SHARING: AN EXISTENTIAL-PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION

Abstract

In 1914 in Vienna there began to emerge two major antitheses to psychoanalysis, namely group psychotherapy and psychodrama. The first of these, group psychotherapy, was a movement toward a fuller recognition of the societal and interpersonal contexts in which the individual normally exists. Psychodrama began to emerge from group psychotherapy as the realization that man creates and lives in his world through action. J. L. Moreno, the pioneer of these methods, becomes somewhat of a middle man of his era, in a constructive positive sense between the purely individualistic man of Freud and the solely collective man of Marx. Moreno stands for the cosmic man who is always both of these men with the expressed understanding that to really treat a person these poles of self and world must be investigated in their mutual implication and structural interrelatedness. It is in this interrelatedness that man creates his home and is continually rebuilding, modifying, and improving that abode in the universe. The body, the psyche, others, and objects of the world must all be taken in their full relation to one another if effective living, much less effective treatment, is to ensue.