M ODELO DE D ISEÑO

In her book, Selbstbegegnung im Spiel (The Encounter with the Self in Play), Elynor Barz emphasizes that C.G. Jung and Jacob Moreno were two essentially different personalities with deeply different life styles (Barz 1988: 13ff.). They never met each other in person during their lives. They never influenced each other.

Yet, they met in theory through the later work of people in various currents of thought who were inspired by them. In fact, when analysts with Jungian training applied psychodramatic techniques, these techniques were the concrete expression of their reciprocal interest in Jung and Moreno as well as the evidence that there was a developing sense that their different typologies were complementary. This has made it possible for the two different theoretical matrices to co-exist, fuse, and reach a kind of synthesis. (Refer to the bibliography for further information on this topic.)

There is little known about any interaction between them during their lives. They lived almost exactly contemporaneously – Jung 1875–1961 and Moreno 1889–1974.

They belonged to cultural environments which – if not common – were at least bordering on each other. Yet, there is only rare evidence that they knew of each other (Gasca and Gasseau 1991: 15ff.). We have some information about Moreno’s knowledge of Jung – or at least, of some of his works – and about Moreno’s opinions about them. Moreno gave Jung the credit for emphasizing the importance of the existence of a psychic substratum common to all people – the collective uncon-scious. However, he took Jung to task for not applying this concept more concretely in the setting of therapeutic group work or applying it in a more socially oriented intervention inside the collective reality in which people live and act. Moreno was convinced that this was the only way that Jung could have given a more concrete form to his theory of the collective unconscious. Contrary to the case of Moreno, no sources have been found evidencing Jung’s comments or appraisals of Moreno’s works. Nevertheless, what Jung thought of groups and their evolution is known.

Several sources cite evidence that Jung’s disciples often found themselves embar-rassed about this topic. Jung maintained that groups could encourage people to lose their sense of responsibility and independence, subject them to imitation, make them vulnerable to others’ suggestions, and weaken the defences of the ego too much.

Eventually, his negative attitude towards groups was modified and subjected to a re-evaluation. Subsequently, he held that the individuative path and the adaptation to the collective were a pair of opposites that nevertheless were able to become complementary.

In a letter written to the Los Angeles psychotherapist Hans Illing on 26 January 1955, Jung wrote that he had founded a group under the auspices of the Zurich Psychological Circle (Jung 1975: 219). At the end of this letter he confirmed the importance of group therapy and acknowledged that it could complement individual analysis. Jung recognized the possible limitations of both approaches.

Group therapy could be limiting because it is collective and individual therapy

could be limiting because it risks neglecting social adaptation. For this reason, the potential complementary natures of the two therapies emerge. Further convergence and parallels between the work of Jung and Moreno can be traced in the several matrices or influences that they share.

The influence of Socratic thought

In her book on psychodrama, Anne Ancelin-Schützenberger asserts that Moreno was inspired by Socratic maieutics (the ‘obstetric’ or ‘Socratic’ method) and Aristotelian catharsis, understood as a consciousness-taking and a purification of the soul (Ancelin 1972: 15ff.). Moreno begins with the basic assumption that everyone has within a creative thought that expresses his or her own individuality, something that can be likened to the image of the Socratic daimon. Just as Socrates used the maieutic method, a therapist should act as a ‘midwife, an obstetrician’

who has the task of delivering the daimon to the light of day by giving it a way of expressing itself. In Daimon, the journal Moreno founded, he writes of his own inner daimon who led him to look for his own personal pathway. In certain ways, the Jungian concept of individuation can be compared to this image of a creative thought that has the character of the daimon, in that this thought thrusts toward a way of expressing and realizing itself that is somehow connected with the image of a strictly individual destiny.

Furthermore, therapeutic practice was considered by Jung to be addressed towards the realization of the person and his or her own creativity through the individuative path. This is something that can be held to be somewhat analogous to Socratic maieutics in its vision of the therapist as midwife. The therapist fosters the coming to light of unconscious contents that allow the person to achieve and thereby accept his or her own individual destiny. The Socratic daimon can therefore be considered an analogue of the unconscious, whose power and independence are things that the conscious ego has to face up to. Moreno considered the function of the Socratic daimon to be closest to the deepest meaning of the term ‘catharsis’ itself, understood as the liberating moment occurring when the emotions are expressed directly.

Moreno treats the concept of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics in this way:

Catharsis is for him not a primary but a secondary phenomenon, a by-product, an effect of poetry upon the reader or spectator. Certainly the early Greek philosophers and Socrates’ Daimon were closer to the deeper meaning of catharsis although they had no name for it.

(Moreno 1946: 14) Jung does not use the term ‘catharsis’ directly. However, he compares the dream to a drama that is expressed and staged in a person’s inner world (Jung CW 8: para.

561–64). The dream brings unconscious contents to express themselves directly to the consciousness. This effect can be considered analogous to certain aspects of catharsis.

The influence of Henr y Bergson’s thought

Jung and Moreno come together in a certain way in that they were both influenced by the philosopher Henry Bergson. Charles Baudouin points out that Jung is indebted to Bergson and to Bergson’s influence upon his era because Bergson somehow sanctioned a liberation from the fetters of intellectualism (Baudouin 1963: 43ff.).

There was a kind of rationalism and positivism that limited the vision of psychology when it imposed inflexible structures and rigid systems between the gaze of the observer and the immediate data of the inner world. As Baudouin points out, Bergson maintained in 1901 that the main task of the new century’s psychology would be to research the unconscious. According to Moreno, ‘To Henri Bergson, for one, goes the honor of having brought the principle of spontaneity into philosophy (although he rarely used the word) at a time when the leading scientists were adamant that there is no such thing in objective science’ (Moreno 1946: 8). Furthermore, there are many other characteristics in Jung’s and Moreno’s work that can lead us to compare them more clearly.

Religious yearning

Jung and Moreno share a common religious yearning that runs throughout their works. Jung considered analytical work to be a journey carried out in the inner world in search of a meaning of existence, which he identified with the realization of the Self as the image of the divinity. For his part, Moreno is spurred on by his desire to bring people to their complete realization through the expression of their creativity. For Jung, the search for God is undertaken in completing and giving life to the images of the soul. It is the kind of search that was most fitting for Jung’s introverted character. In Moreno, the search for God is set in motion by his extroversion. Moreno seemed to be deeply attracted to the image of the demiurge, the God who creates, and he identified with this in psychodramatic creation and realization. As mentioned, he put on the ‘first psychodramatic session’ in his life at the age of four when he aspired to play the role of God.

Basically, the path that Jung and Moreno took in their time represented a route of spiritual searching that offered an alternate to Freud’s positivism, which was bound up in his rejection of religion. Moreno recognized and emphasized the importance of the great figures of religious history in the past and of the way they exercised a cathartic-therapeutic function in public. One might say that Jung recog-nized these religious figures as guiding lights and archetypal images that belong to the world of the soul and could perhaps be identified with the figure that he defines as the ‘Old Wise Man’. This is an archetypal image that appears in dreams as well as in fantasies and seems to play a similar role.

Dramatic action

Jung recognized that dreams had a dramatic structure, outlined in ‘The Essence of Dreams’ (July 1945) and revised and amplified in the 1948 edition (as to be treated in the next section). He affirms that it is impossible to ignore that there is something like a dramatic structure in most dreams (Jung CW 8: para. 561–65). In fact, the dream can begin with some directions, a ‘statement of place’ where the protago-nists are to be presented. Then sometimes there are time directions. For Jung, this part marks the end of the ‘initial situation’. Then a second phase follows that Jung defines as the ‘development’. This presents a growing complication of the situation that generates a certain amount of tension. What emerges is the feeling that something important is about to happen. Then we are at the third phase, which is that of the culmination or peripeteia. Here the tension is released and something decisive happens that affects the flow of events and determines a radical change.

The fourth and last phase follows. This presents the lysis – the solution or result of the dream work that highlights a new kind of set up. By now the contents of the unconscious have come out into consciousness through the dream and have reached a new arrangement. The identification of these four points in the structure of the dream do not yet constitute its interpretation. However, they do allow us to trace out a script and a point of departure. In ‘The Essence of Dreams’, Jung writes: ‘This division into four phases can be applied without much difficulty to the majority of dreams met with in practice, an indication that dreams generally have a “dramatic structure”.’ It may be said that the individual’s inner world is the place where Jung recognizes the same dramatic structure that Moreno presents on the stage.

Dream work

Both Jung’s and Moreno’s work on dreams is strictly linked to the concept of dramatic action. Both maintain that the goal of dream work is to take the dreamer inside the dream itself. Nevertheless, we can say that Moreno gave dream work a rather marginal position in the total sum of his work. He confronted it only occasionally because he was more interested in work that focused on roles and on interactions between individuals. Yet, when Moreno works on dreams, he uses a striking amount of precision in reconstructing the scene. Before he enters the dream, Moreno uses the most exact precision possible to reconstruct the context where the dream takes place as well as the dreamer’s mood, almost as if the presence of the sleeping dreamer were fighting with the conscious dream ego for the central role in the scene.

This brings us back to a concept that Moreno himself kept on asserting (Moreno 1946: 204). In fact, he affirmed that when a person is totally absorbed by a role, no part of his ego is free to observe this role and therefore to record it in its memory.

(Moreno posits the problem of training the ego to fulfil the double role of thinking and acting simultaneously.) At the same time, the attempt to recall the most minute details both about the situation in which the dream developed and about the dream

itself can set off a kind of ‘warm-up’ that allows the dreamer to experience the dream atmosphere most intensely. In this way, Moreno leads people to envision the dream according to its sequence – beginning, development, and end. Over the course of the dramatization, he invites the patient to live through his or her dream while at the same time being outside the dream as an observer.

In Moreno’s work on dreams there is something about the associations made on the dream material that can be considered to be akin to what Jung defines as the work of ‘amplification’. For Moreno, amplification is limited to what can be defined as ‘stimulating the emergence of contents that are more pertinent to the personal unconscious’ of the dream, without delving on a deeper level. This very inter-pretation of the dream can be more related in Moreno to what Jung defines as the interpretation of dreams on the ‘level of the object’ – that is, on a level that privileges an interpretation that is more literal and concrete than symbolic. The dream that Moreno relates in volume 1 of Psychodrama is an example of this. Moreno presents this as a classic in the ‘theatrical interpretation’ of a dream (Moreno 1946: 204ff.).

We can notice how the interpretation that comes out of this is extremely concrete and refers solely to a happening in the past life of the subject.

The patient dreams of flying above the houses of his neighbourhood carrying a bundle in his arms that turns out to be his little sister, as he learns later through the associations he makes. What emerges is that he feels fear and realizes that he has a great responsibility that he does not feel ready to take on. The dream was related to one concrete episode in the subject’s life that concerned his childhood: the protagonist’s parents gave him his very young little sister to take care of when he felt he was still too young to take up this burden. Moreno’s work attempted to bring the protagonist’s feelings of resentment and anger towards his parents to light – emotions that could not have been expressed at the time – and then to help him work those feelings out.

In any case, Moreno ignored other eventual symbolic meanings of the dream as well as the possibility of its being interpreted ‘on the level of the subject’.

Nevertheless, the technique of dramatization itself calls for role changing and gives the dreamer the chance to play various roles. For this reason, it can be related to what Jung terms ‘interpretation on the level of the subject’, even if only indirectly.

However, it seems that Moreno does not refer explicitly to this aspect relative to role changing, at least not in reference to this dream. Jung writes:

Our imagos are constituents of our minds, and if our dreams reproduce certain ideas, these ideas are primarily our ideas, in the structure of which our being is interwoven . . . The whole dream work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer is the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public and the critic. This simple truth forms the basis for a conception of the dream’s meaning which I have called interpretation on the subjective level. Such interpretation, as the term implies, conceives all the figures in the dream as personified features of the dreamer’s own personality.

(Jung CW 8: para. 509ff.)

What the visions of Jung and Moreno have in common is the knowledge that the final and deepest meaning of the dream is intrinsic in the dream itself, and that this is a secret message addressed only to the dreamer. It is something that can neither be expressed in words nor be subjected to any ulterior interpretation. Moreno refers to this as the protagonist’s ‘living through the dream in the psychodramatic action’.

Jung refers to it as living through the dream through the moods, the images, and the emotions that emerge out of it.

THERAPEUTIC TECHNIQUE: FROM CATHARSIS TO