Author: Roger Schaller
The article below was published in the journal: Zeitschrift für Psychodrama und Soziometrie. Here you will find the summary and a link to the full article.
Keywords
Ethics, Moral Judgment, Testimonial Injustice, Hermeneutic Injustice, Social Intuitionism, Director’s Commentary, Autonomy, Psychodrama, Monodrama
Abstract
Psychodrama in the professional field of offence-oriented therapy is first a tool of applied ethics: the scenic action is an attempt to recognise, evaluate and contextualise problematic behaviour and thinking. In order to achieve this goals, some major challenges must be overcome, especially in the individual setting: prejudices, hermeneutic injustice, imbalance of power and lack of autonomy. This article shows how the methods of psychodramatic play and director’s commentary are effective in overcoming these hurdles and promote a shared moral understanding of the behaviours concerned.
In the psychodramatic process, adolescents and young adults with challenging and violent behaviour are given the opportunity to present and justify their delinquent behaviour on the psychodrama stage. In doing so, they are confronted with the therapist’s completely different perspective and can make an attempt to adopt the 3rd person perspective. This refers to the ability to take the other person’s point of view or reality. In the work with young delinquents this means, as a first step, to maintain the connection with the other’s mind and at the same time to accept his separateness and otherness. This also implies giving the client the freedom to present his way of seeing and thinking – a presentation that is often not easy to bear in delict-oriented therapy.
Referring to a case study of offence-oriented therapy and some philosophical works on ethics this article show how psychodrama and ethics come together.
Read the whole article (for free): https://rdcu.be/d1RU2
Author
Roger Schaller, 1955, grew up in Bern (Switzerland), studied psychology there and completed the psychodrama training at the Moreno Institute Überlingen. He is a federally recognised psychotherapist, a specialist psychologist for traffic psychology FSP, president of the Swiss Psychodrama Association PDH and he heads the Institute for Psychodrama and Action Methods IPDA. He is the author of specialist books and articles on role play and psychodrama.
Roger Schaller
Burgerweg 7, 2532 Magglingen, Switzerland
E-Mail: schaller@ipda.ch