Sociodrama is....by Margarida BELCHIOR & Manuela MACIEL (Portugal)

Moreno, the creator of Psychodrama, Sociodrama, sociometry and sociatry, said:

“A truly therapeutic procedure cannot have less an objective than the whole of mankind. But no adequate therapy can be prescribed as long as mankind is not a unity in some fashion and as long as its organization remains unknown.” J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? (1934)

Blatner (2011), an American sociodramatist with worldwide recognition, writes: “Sociodrama was Moreno’s extension of psychodrama, applying this approach to the problems of groups who have role conflicts.” (p. 47)

Maciel (2011) says: “Psychodrama deals with intra and interpersonal conflict, where Sociodrama deals with social conflict, while axiodrama deals with cultural conflict” (p. 288). This means that “the focus is on the group in its collective roles and not the individual or private roles.” (p. 288)

Even if our social and collective problems come from different social and cultural contexts, they are interrelated. Zuretti (2011), from Argentina, learned from Moreno that the individual and its environment are interrelated, too. She created the Sociopsychodrama “to understand in both directions the individual process within the wider social structure and also to understand the social structure from the minimum atom of its constitution, the persona.” (p. 61)

Sprague (2005), referring to Wiener (1995), mentions that sociodrama has three aims: “an improved understanding of a social situation, an increase in participants’ knowledge about their own and other people’s roles in relation to that situation, and an emotional release or catharsis as people express their feelings about the subject” (p.249).

So sociodrama can help:

• To train general spontaneity, by helping people to improvise their thoughts and their behavior;

• To learn how to deal with non-verbal communication: how people can use their body, their face and action to express themselves in a congruent way or to help people to identify others’ incongruity;

• To train assertiveness: to learn different forms of bonding and to get others’ attention in a modular way;

• To train empathy, by role reverse with others, to understand them better;

• To train and analyze roles by participating in others’ scenes, by doubling and by sharing, by exploring social roles which they are not familiar with; to learn how to behave in a job interview or how to present yourself in new social situations;

• To learn how to solve conflicts, how to get support, how to clarify or how to negotiate;

• To promote self-knowledge, by using technics as soliloquy, mirror, double and other techniques. (Batista & Regala, 2013)