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      Chapter 1

      A Life in Psychodrama

      Zerka Toeman Moreno,

      Co-founder of Psychodrama

      Introduction

      There are no longer any other persons alive who were active in 1941 in the world of J.L. Moreno except for me. All those now working in his spirit came later.

      We met in August of that year. I had just brought over to America my older sister with her family from Nazi-invaded, war-torn France, where life for Jews was a life-or-death condition. She arrived seriously emotionally ill. I was a newcomer myself, having arrived here from England about two years earlier. Referred to the Beacon Hill Sanitarium conducted by Dr. J.L. Moreno, a psychiatrist, we took my sister there. Beacon, NY, is on the Hudson River, 60 miles north of New York City. My sister was 29 years of age and Dr. Moreno was especially known for being successful with younger psychotic patients.

      My sister was psychotic, not totally aware of her suicidal state, and in denial of the severity of her emotional condition. She presented a mixture of symptoms, making a treatment plan difficult. This was the second time I

      had witnessed her illness. The first attack had taken place in 1936 when I was 19 years old. My previous experience with her enabled me to assist Dr. Moreno in her therapy.

      My life’s work with Moreno began that moment and lasted for 33 years until his death at 85 years in 1974.

      Treated by psychodrama and group psychotherapy, my sister recovered for a time and was once again admitted to Beacon in 1943, after the birth of her second child, and eventually diagnosed as bi-polar. When she relapsed sometime after the birth of her third child she was treated at another hospital because I was about to have my child and could no longer supervise her care. This time, her life was only barely saved by her husband from hanging herself, while home on a weekend visit from that hospital. The possibility of suicide was what I had feared most. Psychodrama treatment had prevented it in the past. She was again hospitalized elsewhere, recovered, eventually put on medication, but fell ill again from time to time when she discontinued medication. Sadly, this became her way of dealing with her illness throughout her life.

      Bi-polar conditions are life-long. Some patients manage their condition better than others and function well, as my sister did, between attacks. In fact, many are very gifted persons. Today, psychotropic drugs are prescribed to maintain them over time. But for me, these formative educational experiences ran like a red thread through my life. They propelled me to help others.

      My own background had been in art and fashion design. Some of psychodrama’s most creative specialists have come from one or another form of art. I studied Moreno’s philosophy, ideas, and methods and soon I understood their importance, not just for treating mental disturbance, but also for all of humanity. The opening sentence of Moreno’s magnum opus, Who Shall Survive?, first published in 1934 (a prophetic title, five years before the world plunged into war), reads, “A truly therapeutic procedure cannot have less an objective than the whole of mankind” (p.1). (The 1953 edition of that book is now available for free on the web at www.asgpp.org.) It was never Moreno’s intention or vision to deal only with mentally disturbed persons, but he embraced all disturbances between people, cultures, and nations. СКАЧАТЬ