Rev Left Radio - Psychodrama: J.L. Moreno, Psychosociology, and Marxism

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

Walter Logeman joins Breht to discuss the work of psychosociologist, psychiatrist and founder of psychodrama J.L. Moreno.  We discuss his unique approach to psychotherapy, what he had to say about Marx and Marxism, communal v. individual approaches to psychoanalysis, Walter's life and fascinating background, and much more!  Walter Logeman's blog: https://psyberspace.walterlogeman.com/ Recommendations: - "Who Shall Survive?" by Jacob Moreno - The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity - The Philosophy, Theory and Methods of J. L. Moreno: The Man Who Tried to Become God  by John Nolte ------------------- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. On today's episode, I have on my friend Walter Loganman, who worked as a social worker, as a psychologist, as a psychiatrist, throughout his life and many other jobs as well, and wanted to come on and talk about the psychotherapist, psychosciologist, and founder of psychodrama, Jacob Levy Moreno. So we talk about the works of Moreno. We talk about what psychodrama is. We talk about the overlap, perhaps, between some of these methods found in psychodrama and the methods within Marxism, how theory and practice exist in both, for example, how there's a communal aspect to Moreno's psychodrama that might not be found in other areas of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. And it's just a really fascinating conversation with somebody who's lived a very interesting life, somebody born in Europe, during World War II whose parents were deeply impacted by the traumas of that world event and who later became a communist and a Marxist and sort of, you know, tries to weave together insights from the revolutionary Marxist tradition and the psychoanalytic, psychodramatic tradition as well.

So, you know, very interesting, fascinating conversation with somebody who's lived a very rich life and the wisdom and the experience certainly come out in this conversation. So without further ado, here's my conversation with, Walter Logerman about psychodrama and the work of Jacob L. Moreno. Enjoy. I'm Walter Logerman, and thank you for hosting me on this show. That's wonderful. I'm from Christchurch, New Zealand.

I'm a psychotherapist, and I'm getting on. I'm semi-retired, but I continue. you to train people in psychodrama, which is, I'm dedicated to do that, and we have some wonderful trainees here in Christchurch and New Zealand. I'll say a few words about my background because, and how I got into psychodrama and into Marxism. So, first of all, I was born in occupied Amsterdam so my parents talked about German soldiers patrolling the streets as I was born and that war had such an impact on my parents I've heard all the stories of course and but as a psychotherapist now I can see that it screwed them up and they didn't really they'd

They talked about it. They were good in that way. They couldn't stand being in Holland anymore, really. The memories were, that's my interpretation. And then they migrated to Australia to get away from it. And I grew up in Sydney. And similar to them, I moved away from what was difficult there. And I came to New Zealand, which is not that far away, in the 60s.

And I came and did a lot of mountaineering at that time. And I worked in construction sites and so on. But I finished up going to university here, doing philosophy in English, got married, had a son. I mentioned here the counterculture, even though we're so far. away from San Francisco, where it all happened and began. It had a huge impact on my life, and I was very intrigued by it. And with my wife then, we created an inner-city commune and an alternative school. And I could say more about this later, but it hit me that those things,

were not working, even as I was active, very active in those areas. And then I came across Angles, Utopian Socialism, and that was the beginning of Marxism, and I joined the Communist Party in New Zealand in the early 70s. then the marriage broke up and that was so painful and so difficult and as you can understand I'm sure the comrades at that time were not helpful I don't blame them

and it was just very tricky but I went to a psychodrama group and that was enormously helpful and from then on I was active in that area. I was a social worker by that time. And so it became a professional and personal journey. That's my bio, really. Yeah, well, that's fascinating. I kind of have a couple follow-up questions about your bio in particular. You said that your parents, obviously, were living in Europe during, assuming World War II. Yeah. What was their political reaction during

or maybe after the war? Did their politics shift in any way, or was it more of a personal tragic story? Or how did they respond to it in that sense? It's probably more personal, but my grandfather, who I never met and who died in the war, he was a socialist. I have a story where my father,

at some very early age, went to listen to Rosa Luxembourg, as she was talking in the First World War, you know, coming to talk in Amsterdam about that. And my father went to one of those rallies, and his father was a sort of socialist at the time. And so we come from that tradition in the family. And my father was initially pacifist and against the war,

but when he saw what was happening, like so many people in the Second World War he, well he had to enrol he was enlisted but he was okay with fighting in that war and he has terrible stories of the war

just horrendous I won't even go into them but when he was fighting on the front that traumatised him I think enormously and his politics His politics, they just became, he was in the resistance and he tells a story where the communists in the resistance were taking pot shots at the Germans who were occupying

Amsterdam, and then by retaliation they would kill all the men in the block. of flats or houses where someone was killed. Jesus. That sort of ultra left. He didn't like that and he quit. And he saw them as two extremists. So that was what I grew up with. And I can understand that that wasn't a good strategy.

I mean, he just saw too many people die. But just on the same theme, my mother tells a story where he saw children been going into a tram and she knew these were Jewish children and she knew they were going off to Germany and she knew they'd never come back

and she told me that story quite a few times and look I'm in my late 70s and it's hitting me home more now than when I first heard it you know it's no wonder she went crazy she did I'd live with a crazy mama yeah that's absolutely brutal and that was I think sort of par for the course at that time which is these

dramatic traumatic traumatic life altering you know psychological experiences I had grandparents for example that fought in World War II and had you know similar levels of basically what we now know as PTSD, but were never really known or covered as such back then. And so a lot of people, a whole generation really, suffered in silence, not even having conceptual words to make sense of the specific sort of suffering that they were enduring. And I think a lot of intergenerational trauma gets handed down in that way if you have trauma of such insane depths that goes more or less untreated. You have no social institutions that can bring people in and treat them in mass. Then a lot of that gets pushed down generationally with how those parents might lash out or

treat their children. And then they pass on some pathologies to their grandchildren, et cetera. At least, I've seen it in my family, at least. Yeah, and my family. And we must be typical of so many. And so we're living in a traumatized culture really you know wonder we everyone has drama you know yeah absolutely and uh and the traumatic events don't seem to be stopping or slowing in fact they seem to be speeding up as of late um i just i know even though it's it's no comparison to world war two but just the uh isolation of of the pandemic had deleterious psychological effects on huge swaths of the global population and um even the teenagers in my life have struggled with depression coming out of the

isolation. I myself, you know, was impacted negatively by that. And yeah, it just seems like more and more these events are sort of piling up at a rapid pace. And I think there's a mental health crisis currently in the world right now that we're going to really get the full, you know, grasp of in the years to come. Yes. And it's so, you know, when people say the word trauma, they tend to think of an event. But I think that the injury is more insidious than that it's that you don't know that you're actually being traumatized because it all just seems normal and you can come from like so many people say well i i come from a good family a happy family and and there is that aspect but um it's so hard to know that actually there are things

going on that are injuring your mental health that you know all the way through yeah absolutely i do want to ask you one more question about your your biography um well one i just wanted to gesture to the fact that angles is a socialism utopian and scientific is just a crucial text it was it was changing you know for me as well when the first time i read it it made so many things clear it's very accessible um anybody out there who's trying to maybe push a friend leftward that might be a very helpful text to recommend but i wanted to ask about how you how you came to get interested in psychology and eventually you became a clinical psychiatrist, if I remember correctly. Can you talk a little bit about how you got into that line of work and who your influences were?

Yeah, I'm qualified as a social worker. And look, when we were in the Communist Party, there was a, I wasn't mandatory, but I was looking for jobs in the working, you know, in industry really. and when I left and the marriage had broken up I thought to hell with that I'm not going to do that anymore and I looked for a job I called it a wanker's job I needed a break from it all and I was fortunate enough to get a good job as a social worker in the hospital and it actually was a very meaningful job for me and I got fully engaged in that and thinking and I like the word social worker

like thinking of it as working in the society for social change to some extent and being paid for it seemed like a good idea but more and more I was pulled even as a social worker to work in the psychological areas. I became a psychological social worker and worked with people in mental health ward for quite a few years. And that was the same time that I did training in psychodrama.

So I was a social worker trained in psych and qualified in psychedrama. And then, see, this is. one of the polls that happened I then got into private practice as a psychotherapist a registered

psychotherapist in private practice now I actually look back and think the time as a social worker when we used to have meetings about our conditions in the hospital but also meetings

about professional development and working together as people in the hospital and being paid for it that was such a good situation in New Zealand which then all went to custody when the neoliberals got in it really they just started picking away the resources to have a good

social work system going in the hospital and they've been doing that ever since and that was in the 80s like it was all around the world. So I became a social worker and, well, a psychotherapist in private practice and running groups, psychodrama groups, for many years and working with individuals and couples, particularly couples, the sort of specialty I have still. I don't know if that quite answers your question.

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, something you said there I wanted to kind of linger on a bit is this idea that, especially in the neoliberal era, in the U.S., right, it's ushered in, you know, informally under Jimmy Carter, but formally and ideologically under Ronald Reagan. Yeah. And in the 50, 60s and 70s, the U.S. certainly was not, the best in the world when it came to health care or mental health care, but there was social

investment in institutions and, you know, housing and stuff like that for people that suffered with various forms of mental illness. There was, you know, imperfect, but there was something there. But with the rise of Reaganism and neoliberal ideology in the U.S. and apparently around the world, there was a systematic, you know, taking away of the social funding for such policies and programs and, you know, the legacy that we're living in in the U.S. that comes out of that is not only massive inequality, but in every major city in the United States to this day and is getting worse by the day, you have clearly people struggling with mental illness becoming huge swaths of the homelessness population.

So in every major city in the U.S., you'll see these growing tent cities. You'll see people walking down the street, clearly going through a psychotic episode. with nobody to help them whatsoever. And so the legacy of neoliberalism is precisely the mess in every facet that we're living in today. And hopefully we're living at the end of the neoliberal era and hopefully what comes next to something much more communal and just and humane. But there's no guarantee of that for sure. But it's interesting to see that that basic pattern happened in New Zealand and Australia as well as America. Yes, it's happened here with the Labor government.

You know, it was the Labor government that initiated that Roger Normics, they call it. There was a guy called Roger Douglas in charge of the finances, and it was just hit the country with a big wallop. And, yes, it's amazing. I mean, that, you know, as a. as someone with communist background, I

had no surprises that it was going to be the Labor government that did that. But they are a much, it's a bit like the Democrats over there. You sort of you can hold out some hope or they're nicer people

or something, but what they can get away with is just really gross. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, and if if Reagan introduced neoliberalism formally, the Clinton administration doubled down on it and spiked the ball on it and pulled back welfare and increased the carceral state to basically take over, you know, if we defunded the mental health institutions and the workers that would

go and take care of people, the carceral state took over. And so those people are now either homeless or imprisoned as a way of dealing with it as a society, which as we know is no way of dealing with it at all. So you had Rogernomics through the Labor Party and we had Reaganomics and then the Democratic third way Clintonism. It's amazing how that happens globally

isn't it? It's as if it is as if it's organized. Like it just happens in every country at the same time. I think it's the logic of capital and it It reforming itself to conditions.

So if it's a global phenomenon, it's going to have that pattern play out globally. Yeah. So let's go ahead and get into it to psychodrama and the sort of main figure that we're going to be covering today, which is the psychosciologist and psychiatrist and other things, including educator and the founder of psychodrama, which is Jacob Levy Moreno. But first, before we get into him in particular, can you kind of just talk about what psychodrama is exactly, since you already mentioned that term? Yeah.

As I said, I was suffering really from the shock of a marital breakdown. And then I was working in the hospital as a social worker, and I had a wonderful supervisor at that time who recommended I go to this psychodrama workshop. and it was life-changing it was run

in a hospital for a week I got paid to go I don't think I got paid I had to pay for it but I got paid while I was there was amazing it was before the Rodionomics came in

and roughly 20 people were in a group with a director as it's called and we sit in a semicircle and we have a stage, really. It's not a stage.

It's just an ordinary room with an area designated, a circular area designated as a stage. Then there's a warm-up phase where people interact, and it takes a while for us to connect together. And this is typical of psychodrama. It starts with warm-up,

And then a theme emerges, which might be something like feeling isolated or traumatized in some way. And a person becomes, is chosen by the group, really, or by the director as the protagonist. Now, I'll describe a drama that I record. from that session and I'm not naming names it's all confidential but this is a typical story he talks about growing up in a Catholic environment and being with priests and nuns and nuns wrapping him over the knuckle and you know generally being beaten up and feeling isolated and being told about hell and the drama

then becomes very active. 20 people are portraying the culture of growing up Catholic in New Zealand including hell there's one you know people get very spontaneous and we can see people burning in hell

and we can see priests doing what priests do and nuns wrapping him over the knuckle and he plays as the part of these people and that we use a technique called role reversal. So the director

will say, go and be one of these nuns and then reverse roles. And so we see what the he experiences what the nuns do. And then

this traumatic scene is fully alive and it's like we're in his world as a child growing up and then the director says to the child where's God? Well God's up there so okay reverse roles with God and all the tables and chairs get stacked up And literally we have God sitting up there right at the top of the pile, and it's very dramatic.

And reverse roles with God, be God, and God looks down, and he sees people enacting this world, and God starts to laugh, and he looks down, and he says, it's all fucked! and reverse rolls. So he has to climb down from heaven and reverse rolls with this little boy and someone else goes up and takes on the part of God. And then the five-year-old hears those words coming out of the sky.

It's all fucked. Now, that's the climax of the drama. and it's a beautiful drama to watch. Like, I've never gone back to live theatre, you know. It was just so authentic and touching and moving. And then that is followed by what we call sharing because he was working for the group and it was a group process.

everyone in the group then tells the story of how they were impacted in their childhood by their education or by the religion or by the culture and some people have longer stories and others and it's very connecting and it's integrating for the protagonist to know that they're not the only one so that that's um i've i've described what psychodrama is by telling you a story of a drama and that went on all week it was very very moving it changed my life so i could answer more technical questions about psychodrama there's lots of training about how to when i saw that drama that was the moment where i thought i want to learn how to do that

how to direct that and I did and I've directed many dramas that have been maybe not as well done as that because he was a very good director but it is typical well one thing jumps out of me is the is the communal nature of the of the psychodrama so it's people not only playing various roles together but also afterwards talking about the the issue at hand And as a group, which, you know, deviates in some ways from what we often think of as mainstream psychological or psychiatric help, which is, you know, you on a couch or a bed, you know, and a therapist. This is a one-on-one experience, which I'm sure has its own benefits. But there's something about the communal nature here that seems to be one of the mechanisms of psychological healing. Do you have anything to say about that?

Absolutely. the communal nature is central and it's consciously so Moreno Jacob Levy Moreno in the early 20th century began with in Vienna with a house called the house of encounter and he had a philosophy even then as a very young man in his early 20s or even earlier about relationships. And I don't know quite how he did it, but he started to think of relationships as being primary in human relating.

You know, it was the third entity. There's you and me, and there's our relationship, and that becomes central and more important. So he had a very systemic approach and psychodrama obviously is the product of that and there's a phrase that psychodramatists use which is the social atom and at any time a human being is

in a social atom you can't, it's the smallest unit of culture and relationships that are present in the here and now at any one time so you could probably think of your social atom and I can think of mine and it changes over time

and it also tends to persist so that it's hard to if you had an authoritarian figure in your childhood it's the chances are that there will be authoritarian figures in your social atom in as you become an adult and so on so it's very relational

and and and I think this is one of the things that gives me hope, really, that there is a psychological approach that is not individual and just lying on a couch, as you say. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you mentioned Jacob Levy Moreno, the founder of psychodrama proper, and maybe we could say a little bit more about him, who he is just as a historical figure so people can kind of get a grip on

who the founder of psychodrama was. Yeah, he, I think he comes from Central Europe and he began working with children in Vienna, moved to America in, I think, 1925, and became, he was a psychiatrist. And he, in New York, in New York, in New York, York, really. He ran psychodrama groups and he became quite famous for a while. He had a journal called sociometry. In addition to psychodrama, there are streams of practice and one is sociometry and other is sociodrama. And he actually says at some stage, he was he was more interested in changing the world

with sociodrama but everyone wanted to do psychodrama and so those streams aren't as well developed but the main journal which was big at the time

I think it was called sociometry and he gifted that to the sociology people who then changed the name and called it Sociology. But that was the history of the journal for sociology.

There are probably many now, but that was the main one at one stage in probably the 40s, 50s. Yeah, he's a larger-than-life figure. He gets quoted. I have read him extensively, and I'm you know I like reading his concepts and so on it's and it's very useful really to direct dramas and to be involved with people

does require having a sense of the structure of the psyche and how things work. psychologically and his concepts are of as we've already covered relationships are powerful he also has a concept of spontaneity which and warm up warm up is wonderful complex concept that he he invented or named that you can't really get into being spontaneous without a period of warm-up and spontaneity leads to creativity. So they're very central to his philosophy. Yeah, well, I want to kind of focus maybe on that spontaneity

creativity theory of Moreno's and how it relates to psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy more broadly because it seems to me that the emphasis on spontaneity and its adjacent emphasis on improvisation in the psychodrama is psychoanalytic in that it is attempting to you know through spontaneity and improvisation take off this sort of egoic lid on the unconscious and allow things that would otherwise be repressed or if you were just talking in a situation the person might have a chance to sort of filter or hold back some elements of their of their issue. But through spontaneity and improvisation, it seems like that lid kind of comes off and things can more easily flow forward, you know, without that ego playing the role of putting the lid on the thing, as it were.

And that's kind of a crude way to put it. But I was wondering if I'm if I'm on the right track there with my understanding of the role that spontaneated. It's a very, very good way of putting it, and I think he talks about having met with Freud, and he says, he has a little story where, I don't know if it's true, but he says he met Freud and said, Mr. Freud, you analyze people's dreams, I help people dream again and their dreams come true. He also has, he claims he invented everything and I don't know how to go along with it. He was a bit of a megalomaniac. In fact, he speaks of his own megalomaniac as a positive trait. As a megalomaniac would. Yeah, as a megalomaniac would. And, and

oh he invented the concept of the here and now which is very important in psychodrama in that we are able to go what is happening now who is here now even though we're looking at something in the past sometimes I can remember doing a drama about when I was about 10

but the way it's talked about is who else is here B-10 now so I'm not going back into the past I'm reliving it in the here and now now I don't know how different that is from psychoanalysis but he criticizes psychoanalysis for going into the past and staying in the past and analyzing the past and not being able to go into the present moment and working with

spontaneity in the moment so that is the strength of psychodrama be here now and it's you know obviously that's become a new age slogan yeah yeah i think uh the famous book by ron Ram Dass was called Be Here Now, and I think that started a whole cultural movement in and of itself, so that's kind of interesting. Absolutely, yeah, yeah, and there was Moreno talking about that probably 50 years earlier. Wow. And I wouldn't be surprised that Ram Dass had some experience of psychodrama, you know, like many, many people did in those days. It was, and it still is. that's the other thing I could say

the movement exists all around the world I've been to conferences in America and I wouldn't say it's bigger than ever but in places in the world it probably is bigger than ever and it's strong in South America

it's strong in Europe, it's strong in the UK and in Australia and New Zealand And it's like I'm trained in psychodrama, and that is recognized as a modality that licenses me to practice as a therapist. It's good in that way. Yeah. Well, just quickly on the Ram Dass point, it's almost certain that he probably had some engagement with it because, I mean, he started off as a Harvard psychologist and then became a counterculturalist. a leading figure of the counterculture in some way with Timothy Leary, et cetera. So I'm sure he had some engagement or interaction with psychodrama, probably, in some ways at least.

But something that stands out as you talk about the psychodrama and its approach to trauma in particular is that it seems like modern treatment for PTSD does involve bringing back of the traumatic experience in a situation where, or a psychological situation where the threat is not immediate and sort of working through the feelings is how you address the PTSD. And now with the introduction of hallucinatory substances like mushrooms or even the use of MDMA is specifically meant to treat PTSD

in that under the influence of MDMA, lots of feelings of love and the ego sort of relaxes and in that context to reintroduce the traumatic event is at least in some level it seems to be helpful. And obviously there's a lot more scientific study and work to be done to see the full capacity of these substances. But it seems interesting that what is being done with MDMA seems very similar to what's being done in psychodrama in that you're creating a safe, even novel situation in which some traumatic event can be brought back up and dealt with in a way that's not destabilizing. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yes, it does sound intriguing and make sense to me, and I think it's worth pursuing. I think one of the things that, you know, with the set substance and what are those three things? Setting, set, setting and substance? Yeah. The setting is often includes a guide or a person, and or people

and I imagine in those indigenous experiences of ayahuasca and so on that there's quite a lot of communal support a culture that

of people who you know who experience that together and it forms a bond with people so I I think the relationship aspect is quite important.

I mean, people on their own without guidance, without knowing what's happening, would probably freak out and get very little out of it. Yeah, I could not agree more. And there's even, I mean, we had an episode on ayahuasca with our friend Joshua Con Russell, and there's a ritualistic approach to the whole thing. So it's not simply the taking of a substance, but it's the ritual dressing that goes around the taking of the substance that helps you. You know, ground people, et cetera. And it's communal as well, so that has to help. Yeah, so I kind of want to talk and kind of switch the topics just a little bit now that we have an idea of psychodrama of Jacob Moreno and its relationship to psychoanalysis more broadly. This is something I'm always interested in it as a Marxist podcast is the relationship between psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, psychodrama, and Marxism or revolutionary politics more broadly.

certainly some are suspicious that there's any substantive relationship here at all. Many others have made careers trying to weave together various aspects of these things. I think of elements of the Frankfurt School, for example, bringing in psychoanalytic theory and trying to merge it to some degree with Marxist analysis. So what is your take on this relationship and why should Marxists in particular care about the work of Moreno or people like him? Right. It's interesting because Moreno, his seminal book, which is called Who Shall Survive, is I've got a digital copy and I look at, I think it's got about 150 references to Marx, more to Marx than to Freud. he is obsessed with Marx really and

because he was interested in changing the world he had that consciousness but he's an anti-Marxists in many ways where he respects Mark enormously is that he sees his own approach as scientific

and he saw Marx as a scientist in the sense that they were experimenters they weren't just theoreticians they were practitioners and the word praxis comes to mind I mean Moreno you could read him

but he's not really a philosopher he's a practitioner and it's the same with Marx really he is not really a philosopher or only a philosopher he is an activist and he believes that

theory comes out of practice which is exactly how works in psychodrama. Moreno actually talks about himself or psychedrama being of

a, well sociometry really being a form of social science and it comes from working with people and people investigating themselves and being part of the experiment, not being experimented on, but initiating the experiment. So it's very radical and it's beautifully conceived. I don't know that it's very hard to put into practice, except that every psychodrama group is a form of experimentation. So there's a link there with Marx and Marxism that I think is crucial.

It is theory that comes out of practice with groups of people. So sometimes I think it gets awfully close to being a revolutionary practice. talks about it being a revolutionary practice, but as a Marxist, I think there's a gap as anti-Marxism doesn't help. He's mostly, of course, he equates Marxism with the Russian, with Stalinism, really. he probably had experiences that weren't so good in Central Europe. But at the same time, when he goes to America, I think the individualism of the capitalist culture, it penetrates all of psychotherapy, really.

I have a phrase, individual solutions to social problems, which I have dedicated my life to, really. I mean, I've practiced individual solutions to social problems. And, you know, why wouldn't I value that work? I do. I value the work. But there's a contradiction in there that is troubling. Well, I think it also mirrors the fundamental contradiction within capitalism as actually, funnily enough, laid out in Engels' socialism, scientific, and utopia where there's this inherent contradiction between the social production of value and goods in society and the individual appropriation of those profits.

And so, you know, that's a core contradiction within capitalism itself, and it seems to manifest in an interesting way here where there's the, you know, individual solutions to social problems. and that it has its inherent limitations because it's inherently a sort of contradiction. And one of the weaknesses of, you know, my experience is as an American and American psychology in general, we've talked about it many times in this show, is that there seems to be little to no recognition at the institutional level of social conditions and how they play into mental illness or lack of mental health or whatever it may be. And we certainly hear all the time, like if you're depressed or you're anxious, you know, know, the go-to mainstream sort of response is you have a neurochemical imbalance or this is

something to do with your individual biology or your individual trauma and not really connecting that up to not only rotten, but lately rapidly deteriorating social conditions, which of course we know on some level it's almost common sense that this has an impact. Nobody's going to deny, for example, that the pandemic had a collective impact on mental health in our society and in the global order, but when it comes down to how we structure getting people help and we structure our psychological and psychiatric institutions, they're still very much tied to this hyper-individualistic, hyper-biologized approach to mental illness, which is a core weakness of it, I think.

Yes, yes. And this is where I want to be an advocate for psychiatrary. and Moreno because so often listening to Marxists, they will reference, you know, obviously Le Can and Freud and psychoanalytic theory and make through the Frankfurt School, as you say, and today I listen to, I think he's wonderful, actually. I listen to your show with Todd McGowan and Hegel and so on. and yet, I think, I wish some of these theorists and Marxists knew about Moreno,

like one concept that we have in psychodrama is the concept of role. Now, it comes from theatre, but it's not acting in that sense. it's a concept where we name people's roles like he is a creative artist or a seductive lover now we can see that on the stage

and we can use the group to name people as they are in their whole being and there's something very holistic about that. It's not thinking what are they feeling, what are they thinking, what are they doing? It's what role is

emerging in them. What is the role they need to develop? What is the role that's missing? What's the role that's overdeveloped? So we can talk about people in a very full way without, like

I always have a sense that when people start talking about the brain and the feelings and the actions they're breaking something down that actually needs to be seen as a whole and not as a whole as an individual but with other roles around it

like every role is a response to another role. So if someone has a particular... I don't like the word role that much because it sounds like a pretense, but it's a way of being. So every way of being is a response to another way of being

and so we can produce a drama on the stage of all the roles that are affecting a person at a particular time, and it's systemic, it's relational, it brings in social forces, it seems to me it would be just lovely for Marxist theorists to have a better understanding or to use those concepts and to have experience of looking at life through that lens in action, you know?

So the relationship between psychedrama and Marxism, I think the word praxis, it's a practice that can be taught. And it's so important, I think. Yeah, I like that. I like that connection between theory and practice. And you said this experimental approach, as well as the communal aspect of it as well. These are all things that kind of set it apart from other forms. of psychotherapy and that seem to dovetail or at least have the possibility of dovetailing with a Marxist framework in general.

I wish. It has the possibility and it can do that. One thing I was going to kind of, I was sort of thinking about is, you know, this bridge between Marxism and psychoanalytic thinkers broadly. And it's always been a place of tension. And the psychoanalytic giants themselves, Freud, Jung, and Lacan, in particular, they were very sort of not very but kind of conservative in their personal politics and I think and they're all when they spoke about Marxism which was fairly rarely

you know more or less dismissive or like you know Freud would specifically attack it I think in civilization and its discontents if I remember correctly so there's always this kind conservative edge and you mentioned Moreno having affinities with Marxism and even citing Marxism but being an anti-Marxist himself I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit on what made him an anti-Marxist, perhaps in his personal life, or his professional life? Yeah. I think he criticizes Marx for being an economist and thinking that, which I don't like that criticism, but anyway, that's what he does. He thinks this is an economic revolution and psychological

revolution needed and that Marx ignores the psychological revolution and thinks that everything will come right if there's a change in the relationships of the means of production

and that therefore he was sort of blind to the psychological and Moreno almost wants to turn it the other way around. Like if we have a psychological revolution, then the other things will follow.

So he didn't see Marx as having an understanding of small groups and being too general about big groups like class. That's one of the criticisms of Marx that he has. I think it's a I think whenever I read his criticisms of Marx I just I think no he's wrong

he doesn't get it he's an idealist he thinks ideas are more important than he thinks that Marx's ideas weren't right but he doesn't really get

that it is history that we're dealing with and you know the Marxist you can probably articulate it more better than I can

but he just thinks I've got better ideas than Marx that's this criticism of Marx which I think sort of misses the point about Marxism being understanding

the class structure as like a material basis is going to really be the fundamental aspect of what creates change. Yeah. And I mean, there's a Marx quote that I think specifically answers the criticism that, you know, that there's a psychological revolution needs to take place before a material, political revolution, the famous Karl Marx quoted it, is it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. And so if you want a psychological or a spiritual revolution, the Marxist argument would be,

sure, but that has to come almost after a change in the mode of production and the social relations. So we have the revolution that overturns the capitalist mode of production and social relations, thereby creating space and opportunity and possibilities for new ways of engaging the consciousness, of developing the psychology, et cetera. And so, you know, I kind of think of them as in a dialectical, you know, relationship where they can, it can sort of be both and, where we, you know, we work on certain fronts alongside our political work. It doesn't necessarily need to be a chronological, stagist approach. But certainly I'm a Marxist in the sense that I think the material mode and social relations are ultimately determinative of how people

broadly think and experience their lives and themselves. And so, you know, it would have to come with a radical change on that front to open up the possibilities and the horizons of a spiritual or a psychological evolution. Yes. Well, well, poor. That's – and yet in there, in that dialectical relationship, I think the emphasis in Marx is on the structural and

perhaps Moreno is right that would be wonderful if group practice was I mean organizations need to develop to create social change

and they often falter and they don't have a way of dealing well with their group process and the Moreno methods do have an enormous richness for dealing with group development and that could help social and political organizations. I mean, at the moment, people who are trained in these methods

often get jobs in organizational development, helping corporations and capitalist firms, you know, have better leadership. That's how it's gone. Yeah, absolutely. And we were talking earlier about hyper-individualism in our society, and you can see the deleterious effect that hyper-individualism has when people, even of a shared political program on the left, let's say, try to get together organizationally,

a lot of those hyper-individualistic impulses come out, certain people dominated by their egos want to be the next Marx or the next Lenin or think their ideas are more, you know, accurate than the collectives or, you know, dressing up interpersonal disputes as ideological ones. These are all things that eat away at organizations from the inside out. And so to have a psychodrama, you know, approach within these organizations or anything like it, where you communally work out things in that way, alongside, you know, your political organization could probably bring people together, kind of hedge against the sharpest edge of individualism and present something like, you know, something good for the, for a movement of that sort. It could be helpful.

And that's what I mean is it doesn't have to come one after the other, but these things can be sort of experimented with together. Yes, yes. And there's a phrase in psychotherapy. that there's an individual paradigm and there's a relational paradigm. And that doesn't come from Marx. It comes from couple therapy, which I'm involved in. And there, in couple therapy, it is really clear that the relationship is just not seen clearly in the culture.

the primacy of couples people will even treat couples by seeing one partner and seeing the other partner whereas Moreno talked about the capacity of one of the health in the system being able to heal each partner And so he's a facilitator of the dynamics, but he's not the, he doesn't generate, the health comes from the relationships in the group or in the couple in the dyad. And he was talking like that, you know, in the 30s when group, he invented group psychotherapy. so there's a lot of richness in psychodrama that is able to address individualism and I think that's important because at the same time individualism creeps into everything we do it's very hard to fight against and I also think one of the the core contradictions, if you will, of capitalist individualism is precisely in the not

seeing how healthy individuals are fostered and come out of healthier communities. So this idea that you could chop off the communal part and everybody's just a rational, free individual acting in their own interests and sort of understanding ourselves and our society and other people through that lens actually weakens the very individualism you're claiming to promote because by chopping off communities, you eradicate the womb through which healthy individuals can possibly emerge. And we're seeing that in our societies. Yes, absolutely.

And it probably all starts with mothers and babies. And those relationships, you know, there's mothers and babies, but mothers need support. Yeah. Well put. I totally agree about the parental and the maternal and the maternal. safety net of a society investing or divesting in those people. Right now we see an America society that offers no help to working class parents. We know only country in the developed world with no maternal or paternal paid leave, for example.

At the same time where the right ring, theocratic fascist Supreme Court is dictating to all women that they must carry their fetus to birth. underruled of carceral punishment. So it's just, it's absolutely insane and downright evil, offering no help on one hand, while also mandating pregnancy and birth for women. It's chaotic, yeah. Yeah. I've actually really enjoyed this conversation. Is there anything, before we get into recommendations for people that want to learn more, is there anything else that's been left unsaid, any issue or topic or point that you want to make before we enter the wrap-up? appear? A word just comes to mind, which is a psychodrama word called doubling, and it's the capacity of one person to stand behind another person and become them and double them. And

it's just a technique that we use a lot on the stage. and in psychodrama groups. And it's such a wonderful experience to have someone behind you, being you, and bringing out what you're not saying and you would like to say. And I think the word doubling came to mind because I think you're an excellent double. As I've been speaking, your questions and comments,

get me going. And it's very helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for coming on and teaching me. Because before you, I had no idea about Moreno or psychodrama and then prepping and then having this conversation with you.

Very interesting stuff. And I think that will be true for much of my audience. And I know in my audience, we have counselors, we have therapists, we have people who are into theater. And so if they could take something from this and sort of weave it into their various forms of work and assistance, I think that would be really beneficial for people all across the board. Yes. I would love to see Marxist people and psychological experts be able to work together in a way that I've

never really seen happen yet. Yeah. It would be very good. Absolutely. I could not agree more. You know, I mean, you've talked about them as being different domains. Yeah. Just because sometimes, you know, criticism from one camp or the other is sometimes assumes that, you know, well, I'm a psychoanalytic person. Marxism doesn't answer these questions. Well, it's not meant to. And on the other side, Marxism is like, well, I'm a Marxist. Why would I get involved in psychoanalysis?

Yeah. Well, you know, they're addressing totally different realms of human life. So there's no need to put them in competition with one another. No, but I think they can help each other. Yes. And probably needed an more integrated approach is possible, I think. Absolutely. Well, before we let you go, Walter, do you have any recommendations for people who would like to learn more about anything we've discussed today? And where can people find you and your work online?

So I can imagine a few people wanting to maybe reach out to you directly if that's a possibility. So yeah, recommendations and ways to get a hold of you, if possible. you'll find me on my website walter logerman.com and I think from there you'll also find my blog I've written about these matters for decades in little blog posts and some articles that are available

but if people are interested in Moreno I think the best way would be to find some sort of psychodrama group and experience psychodrama locally wherever you are in the world. It would be a good thing to do. But if you wanted to read a book, there's a book by Jonathan Fox, who is the inventor of playback theatre. he's got a book

I'm not sure what it's called I've got it here but I won't look for it but Jonathan Fox on psychedrama he condenses the many many volumes of Moreno's writing to the essence

and if that book's available it would be a good book to find Moreno's book he's written quite a few but who shall survive would be good to find it's available

digitally online but you can't buy it you just have to Google until you find it somewhere as a PDF but it's an enormously

tricky book to read and yet I enjoy it and I enjoy it and I delve into it, who shall survive? It was written in 1932 and then revised in 53, and there's a 1979 edition floating around. Wonderful. Well, I'll link to your website for sure. People can reach out and read more of your work or reach out to you directly through that. And I think

I looked it up when you were talking the book by Jonathan Fox, The Essential Moreno, writings on psychodrama, group method, and spontaneity. Is that sound right? Yeah, that's it. That's it. Well done. Wonderful. So people can go read those books to learn more, but also I think your main advice would be, if at all possible, find a local psychodrama place and just go and experience it because that's the best way to kind of get involved. Yeah, it would be a very good thing to do, I think. Wonderful. Well, thank you.

All right. Thank you so much, Walter. Yeah, this was an honor and a pleasure, and I learned a lot. So I really appreciate you coming on. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.