Sociopsychodrama: living sociometry, sociodrama and psychodrama

Author: Jana Damjanov
This article was published in the book : Sociodrama: The Art and Science of Social Change(str. 78-97), L’Harmattan, 2021. and is free to download.
This author has written multiple articles on sociodrama. The book is available as pdf for download: The Handbook of Sociopsychodrama PDF view of the file knjiga_discovering languages of peace_za web_za korekciju_24_10_2023.pdf

Sociopsychodrama: living sociometry, sociodrama and psychodrama

Summary

In this text you will read about sociopsychodrama and how it is connected to the roots of Morenian role theory and living sociometry. You will also be able to learn about sociopsychodrama through practical examples of peace work with people from the former Yugoslavia, and with women with disabilities and Roma adolescents.

Sociopsychodrama!

Sociopsychodrama! What is it, what does it mean? Why do I use this term and see it as one method? What experiences led me to this idea and how I understand Moreno’s theory? Can we do sociodrama without any ideas about psychodrama or can we do psychodrama without knowing about sociodrama?
My sociopsychodramatic road started in 2015, when I met Monica Zuretti at the FEPTO conference and annual meeting in Bonn, Germany. I had read beforehand about psychosociodrama and sociopscyhodrama mainly from authors from South America – Brazil and Argentina. Meeting Monica Zuretti made things clearer for me in an experiential way. It also gave me a new perspective of looking at Moreno’s theory and philosophy, and at the methods of sociodrama and psychodrama that he created. I could understand, through my encounter with Monica Zuretti’s work, how the processes of psychodrama and sociodrama need to work together in an integrated way, and that it is possible but not necessary to separate them. My ideas expanded when I went to the sociodrama conference on Kos, where I met Monica Westberg and many other colleagues: my experiences here reassured me that my thinking and understanding of sociopsychodrama was correct. My understanding now is that sociodrama and psychodrama need to be together when we work with Moreno’s concepts, his theory and philosophy. Moreno himself made no division of sociometry, psychodrama and sociodrama as methods, only of their directions and procedures.

Moreno’s Role Theory

To explain the method of sociopsychodrama, one needs to explain Moreno’s role theory. Often in my practice, people asked me: “What is role?” There are many ex planations of what roles are, but in our method of sociodrama and psychodrama roles are very important, they are one of the main tools “items” with which we operate.
So, what is role? We can say that roles are some sort of mental maps that help human beings orientate themselves in the world around them. It is important to notice that not only human beings have roles. Animals also have roles, but the repertoire of their roles is much narrower than that of humans. This is also why animals have simpler lives and humans have much more complicated lives. Moreno used to say that humanity would not need psychotherapy if a mother could be a mother, a father be a father, a doctor be a doctor, etc. But that is a dream of a different society. The clearest way to compare humans to animals is to narrow down the comparison to mammals, since mammals learn from their parents, and humans are mammals. So, we see that roles belong to both the human and the natural world. They also appear in interaction with other subjects or with the surroundings in which we live. Roles are dynamic and developmental and are necessary for forming psychic structures in our brains. For humans, roles are multidimensional, they have different levels and different layers, and they develop in different matrices that form our self: identity matrix, social matrix and cosmic matrix.

The etymology of the word role explains itself. In old French it was a scroll of paper with text for actors, while in old Latin (rotula) the meaning was ‘little wheel’. Perhaps the image of the wheel explains the rounded shape of a role and the fact that roles are flexible and developing all the time. For example, some roles are both individual and social (social roles), whereas some are connected to the body function (psychosomatic roles); and there are the roles that Moreno called psychodramatic roles, which are all our internalised roles, i.e. combinations of the psychosomatic, collective and individual roles. Perhaps we need to reflect more upon the psychodramatic role?
What would be the first role? Is it the idea that the baby is one with the mother?
The baby after being born does not differentiate itself from the mother, from the breast, the nipple, the milk… There is a sense of all-identity and oneness. Or is the first role perhaps chaos itself, since the baby is disorganised in a cognitive way? It does appear to me that the first role is chaos – not differentiating oneself from any thing (from the mother, the breast, etc). Then the second psychodramatic role that emerges, which brings safety to the baby, is the idea of oneness: being one with the mother or caregiver (for the children who do not have a mother). It is interesting to reflect on these roles, which Moreno called “psychodramatic roles”, since they are the roles that we internalise throughout our lives.
The discussion about what role is belongs to the behavioural and social sciences, as well as to drama and theatre. Moreno’s role theory covers behavioural, social and philosophical elements of human beings and humanity, but it also attempts to address our relations to everything around us, even the cosmos itself. From the perspective of Morenian theory and philosophy, it is very important to say that each role also has its complementary role. Not counter role, as some theorists think, but complementary role. There is no teacher without a student, no mother without a child, etc. When we concede that roles are complementary, it means that they are equal and that, for example, it is not just the teacher who teaches, students also teach their teachers.

Everything is relational and connected according to Moreno’s theory and philosophy. With that in mind, we also have direction for how to do our methods of sociodrama, psychodrama, sociopsychodrama, psychosociodrama and sociometry.
Moreno’s role theory is behavioural, relational and developmental and is connected to his theory of the spontaneity and development of a child. To understand his role theory, one must understand that we are developing, as well as our roles, in the different matrices of our identity. The matrix, as a term, explains the inter- and intra-connectedness of our experiences, which include elements of past, present and future. At the same time, the inter- and intra-connectedness of the matrices of human identity cover the network of connections in one human, but also in humans in groups: this network of connections exists between subject, environment, family, society, culture and all that surrounds a human being. To explain better how this theory is behavioural, relational and developmental, we have to understand that the behavioural manifestation of a role emerges in relation to another role and has the possibility to develop. I will try to give an example through the roles of baby and mother. Both roles emerge at the moment of the baby’s birth. The role of a mother does not appear before there is a baby (we can apply this also to adopted parents); these two roles start developing through their relationship and continue to develop over time with both child and mother learning as they develop. In this way, the be havioural element of the role, i.e. how the role represents itself, also develops. This is also why every role has its complementary role, and how the two roles help each other to develop and evolve. It is also important to note that there can be more than two roles in a relationship (for instance, mother–child–father, or supervisor–trainer
client–therapist). Each of the roles in these relationships has its complementarity. In the complementarity, there is a potential for growth and healing. Moreno explains the development of a role through the different stages of a child’s development.

To understand role theory better, I feel it is very important to explain the three concepts of the Philosophy of the Moment: locus nascendi, status nascendi and matrix.
These three factors represent three views of the same process. “There is nothing without its locus, no locus without its status nascendi, and no status nascendi without its matrix. The locus of a flower, for instance, is in the bed it’s growing. Its status nascendi is that of a growing thing as it springs from the seed. Its matrix is the fertile seed, itself.” (Moreno, 1977) So, to translate’ Moreno’s poetic explanation, the fertile seed would be the identity matrix in which the child grows. This identity matrix is created as an encounter between the people who created the child and the encounter of their matrices (identity, social and cosmic).
The first universe as Moreno called it, or the all identity, is the moment when the child is born. There is no real differentiation of any role from any other in this period of life. The very first role which is independent and we all have when we come out from the mother’s womb, and it happens very quickly, is the role of a breather (Zuretti, 2017). It is the first independent role that appears in the living human. Its complementary role is the role of cosmos through the air that is inhaled and which connects everything around us (personal communication, Zuretti, 2020). Then, in the first few days, new roles begin to develop. They are all psychosomatic roles and they develop in relation to the others who are caregivers for the child. It is also necessary to understand that the role of mother and role of father are also just being born and are also undeveloped. The first matrix of emerging of roles is called the identity matrix (Zuretti, 2007). The roles appear before the self and so create the self of the child. The action (breathing) comes before consciousness. In the matrix of identity, co-being, co-action and co-experience amplify the importance of the child’s relationship with others and things around them. This matrix of identity can be viewed as a place where the child’s first process of emotional and cognitive learning happens, mainly through psychosomatic roles: eater, sleeper, eliminator of urine and faeces. In the matrix of identity, as well as in every matrix of identity, roles have complementary roles. The process of complementarity is best described through the roles of giver and receiver.
The matrix of identity is the social placenta for the child’s development. According to Moreno, at a certain point in the child’s development, with the begin ning of the second universe, personality becomes more differentiated and divided.

These are called social roles and psychodramatic roles. Social roles are all the roles that belong both to the individual and to the collective, all of which can be part of the cultural conserve of the country/place/region from which they emerged. I will give an example from a sociodrama training meeting that happened during the PER FORMERS project. We had a proposal to create a few sociodramatic scenes. I offered something from my experience working as the human resources manager at a factory in Serbia that produces cables. It was a scene where I needed to enter the office of the factory’s general manager. In that scene, there are four important roles, general manager, big padded door, general manager’s secretary, and me as human resources manager. It is important to note that this scene happens in an international group.
So, as is normal in sociodrama, people from the group can take the roles they want or feel like trying. Different people from different European countries, with their different social matrices, took the role of the general manager. But my important learning and lesson from this was how important it is to take the cultural conserve into consideration when we work, especially in groups where we have different cultural conserves. Because the role taking of the general manager in Serbia, without previous knowledge and information about the specific cultural conserve and social context, brings into that specific role many other cultural conserves that belong to different countries. It is not the same as the role of general manager in Great Britain, Hungary, Portugal, Sweden, even though it is a social role, since social matrices of different countries are different. We can understand this through other social roles that belong to different social matrixes and have different cultural contexts and cultural conserves.
Cultural conserve is a theoretical concept based on Moreno’s theory and philosophy. It is very much related to the concept of spontaneity. Moreno explains cultural conserve and spontaneity as polar concepts, i.e. they are two poles of the same dimension. One part, which represents the ideal exponent of spontaneity, would be the totally spontaneous creator, while the ideal exponent of the other is the total cultural conserve (Moreno, 1977). Every cultural conserve, in order to be created, needs spontaneity at its very beginning. To better understand the concept of cultural conserve, I give the examples of a book, folklore, music, language, religion, etc. The cultural conserve has something that is fixed, since something that belongs to the cultural conserve is something that also belongs to the past, not just to the present.
Some cultural conserves are well taken care of by society so they tend to be saved for the future, not changed. Spontaneity is infinite and doesn’t have anything fixed. We could say that we can also measure the health of the social matrix by understand ing how many cultural conserves are preserved and how much spontaneity can take place. Spontaneity, on the other hand, belongs to the present among here-and-now concepts, i.e. to the philosophy of the moment. So, every cultural conserve starts with a spontaneous action. What will happen to the cultural conserve that was once created is a matter for the social matrix. Is it going to be open and will society be capable of changing it or is it fixed with the potential of becoming robopathy, opposing the principles of spontaneity and creativity? It is important to understand that society and the social matrix need cultural conserves, although there are some cultural conserves that need to be questioned because they tend to preserve the social matrix as it is, without the possibilities of change.
I will just give a few examples of different social roles: psychologist, doctor, patient, client, lawyer, cleaning lady, shopper, addict, etc. Social roles can also be something that is not related to human beings, i.e. the healthcare system, religion, a boat, a table, jail, the media, university, a country, the local community, especially when they have been put up in a sociodramatic scene. So, all the social roles emerge from the social matrix, and have both individual and collective (social, historical, cultural) elements. In this way, we can understand that the social matrix of our identity, like the identity matrix, has different dimensions in terms of time – the past, the present, the future – but also the historical perspective of phenomena we are playing or acting out, such as cultural aspects, political aspects, etc.
Psychodramatic roles are the roles that are created within ourselves through the experiences we have in life, i.e. all the roles we internalise throughout life and which are played out in the psychodramatic or sociodramatic scene. They belong to the “truth” of a person (in terms of psychodrama) and to the “truth of group” (in terms of sociodrama) (Teszary, Damjanov, personal communication, 2020). They are a combination of the individual, collective and fantasy. A psychodramatic role can be the role of mother, but it can also be the role of God, death, a tree, a family table, a fairy, a star, etc. When they are played out, they need the scene and surplus reality to be role played and acted out.
As Moreno said, role playing comes before the emergence of self, action is before conscious being. Roles do not emerge from the self, although the self can emerge from roles (Moreno, 1977). His theory of the development of roles is explained through the development of a child, although it can also be applied to the development of groups and to observing and understanding group processes. For example, we can say that every group has an initial stage of genesis which is chaos (the first psychodramatic role), and then, after differentiation, the feeling of oneness and cohesion become very important, in order for a group to be formed (group and I are one, Mother and I are one). Later on, we have more differentiation in terms of the roles and phenomena that emerge from a group and that belong mainly to the social matrix.
Of course, this also depends on the type of group with which we are working and the contract through which we are working. Is it a one-day ad-hoc workshop group, is it an ongoing therapy group, is it a series of workshops for the same group, etc.? But we can also apply this theory to the development of different groups.
The cosmic matrix of our identity is very nicely explained in Moreno’s quote from Who Shall Survive?

It is important to note how he describes “cosmic entity”, which I understand is his way of explaining the perspective of the co-creation and co-responsibility of human beings, who are not just related to other human beings but to all that is around us which we see and do not see. The cosmos itself was for Moreno the place of infinite spontaneity and creation, not just for his ideas but also for basic principles of astronomy, physics and quantum physics. It is important to look at this part of human identity when we think of issues related to climate change as well as to the situation of Covid pandemic. In terms of co-creation and co-responsibility, we can easily understand how individual, social and cosmic elements are interconnected.
After explaining role theory and identity matrices, perhaps I can respond to the question “what is sociopsychodrama?” It is a method that embraces both social and identity matrices; it is a method that takes into consideration the fact that there is no clear division between society and the individual, because many personal issues are connected with social hierarchy levels and their dimensions. In terms of a group, whether we will use sociopsychodrama, psychosociodrama, psychodrama or sociodrama depends on the contract. After the contract has been made with the group, for me, whether something will become psychosociodrama (starting with the individual matrix and protagonist centred work and then going to the social matrix where all group members can take part) or sociopsychodrama (starting from a social matrix where all group members take part in action and then going into individuals’ identity matrices) is a matter of direction.

Living Sociometry

For many years, I conducted integrative TA and sociopsychodrama workshops, with a colleague of mine who is a psychiatrist and TA psychotherapist, supervisor and trainer. These workshops were very popular and covered many issues – love relationships, partnership issues, attachment issues, conflicts and how to resolve them, communication and how to improve it, how we deal with finances and why do we do it that way, transgenerational approach, etc. This collaboration lasted for seven years.
We would have six or seven workshops per year always with 20 to 30 participants. At one of the first conferences of the Serbian Association for Psychotherapy, we had the most highly attended workshop, with 80 participants. These were ad-hoc groups that lasted for one or two days or, in the case of the workshop at the conference, the group that met lasted for only two hours. No matter the workshop or context, at the beginning we would always do a sociometry experiment which looked like this: we would ask participants to choose someone with whom they would like to talk and be in a pair with without previously knowing the other person. Later on, they would pick another partner. This is how we would form groups. But before forming the groups, people would talk in pairs about why they picked each other and if they found anything similar between them. Both in pairs and in groups, their choices turned out to be impeccable. The pairs would have similar family issues and similar stories related to their love life and choices of partner, or a similar way
of dealing with finances. As we would say within the framework of our method – it was a wonderful tele phenomenon. Sociometry is a scientific method that measures relations within a group, and tele is measured using a sociometric test. Tele represents the distance between people, but is not measured with usual measurements. It is the distance between two people in terms of recognising, encountering and experience each other. I once led a workshop in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in which there was a woman who worked on her role of mother during the war (she had been in a part of Sarajevo from which she could not escape for four years so she could not see her children for all that time). She chose a very young woman who attended the workshop to play herself in the role of mother. There were other women of her age who were mothers but she picked this young woman. In sharing, we found out that it was tele that brought them together in the psychodrama scene, a young woman who had been in the same part of Sarajevo during the war and who was cut off from her father for four years, who was at the other end of town.
Sociometry in groups happens no matter if we who work with groups ask specific questions or not. Every group, no matter whether it is small, medium or large, has its own organic way of developing, leading to different sociometry at different stages. For both the sociodramatist and psychodramatist it is important to be able to note and follow up the living sociometry of the group. In this way they can understand and examine why some people connect in pairs, triads or small subgroups whereas some do not pick anyone and remain alone. Sociometry is not only focused on positive choices (with whom you would like to share a room), but also on negative choices (with whom you would not like to share a room) or neutral choices, which have the possibility of developing into positive or negative choices.
We can look at sociometry as a basic (fundamental) language, as Moreno said in Who Shall Survive? (Moreno, 1953). According to Monica Zuretti, it is a language that is changing all the time in the context of human relations, groups and their development. It is actually about how people make choices (Kristoffersen, 2017), so we need to look into it carefully. It is why there is a difference between living sociometry and something that is called “cold” sociometry. In the living sociometry, you see how, organically, by the nature of encounters, people make choices and you can explore this without taking away spontaneity and creativity but putting spontaneity in front. Living sociometry develops spontaneity and creativity. In cold sociometric procedures we “froze” spontaneity by doing sociometric procedures. I remember how this became very clear to me after participating in Monica Zuretti’s workshop in Trondheim, Norway. The workshop was on the issue of living sociometry and Monica Zuretti asked a very simple question after one of our coffee breaks, “Who was with whom during the breaks and what did you talk about?” The group formed
very organically into natural dyads, triads and small subgroups; someone was alone because they were talking on their phone. Out of this sociometric question, a psychodramatic work emerged. Actually, this was living sociometry because it was following the group process through a democratic way of facilitating the group. For me, after this experience, investigating sociometry in groups was never the same.
I could understand how to look at sociometry from different roles and different perspectives, not just as a facilitator of a group, but also as a participant. We can see living sociometry at conferences, for example, even though we don’t examine it. We easily see sociometry in with whom we take breakfast, with whom we spend time at workshops, with whom we eat dinner, with whom we spend our free time, who is alone most of the time, etc. We can apply sociometry to every meeting we have with another person or group of people. As with most of Moreno’s theory and philosophy, it is a living situation and part of the existence of living beings. Even animals and plants have sociometry of their own. So, I prefer to think and write about “living sociometry”, as Monica Zuretti and Jonathan Moreno call it, because it is not something that is static, but very dynamic (Kristoffersen, 2017). It is also important to look into other ways of doing sociometry and reflect upon them and
what difference one approach makes to groups in comparison to other approaches. I remember when I started my training in psychodrama, not much attention was given to sociometry, we learned about it mainly as a method that helps the leader of a group understand what the important qualities of that group are. We learned it by splitting the group into those who say yes to a question and those who say no (there was also the option to stay in the middle). But if we look into the movement alone that this way of doing sociometry creates, it is very static and fixed, without many possibilities. It also instigates splitting into groups because if you have one part of the room representing yes and the other part representing no you end up with the two groups standing opposite each other in different parts of room. Someone who facilitates a group process must be aware of these things, especially if the group has transgenerational traces of war trauma (for example with those from former Yugoslavia). On the other hand, if we work in a circle and ask participants to approach the centre of the circle as a response to a question (closer to the centre of circle is yes, and more to the edge of the circle is no) that makes a difference in terms of movement and what it creates for the atmosphere of the group. Let’s try to imagine these two approaches by asking a very simple question: “Who has a sibling?” If we
split people in two parts of a room, we will have two groups (maybe three) standing separate from each other. If we do it in a circle, we will see small subgroups of people forming around the question, and we all still stand as part of the circle, no matter our response.
Through this example, I want to point out how very important it is for facilitators of groups to be able to reflect with participants about sociometry, because it is the only way to develop and understand it better. It is very important to take into consideration movement, time and space when we explore and look into the sociometry of a person or group.
Sociometry is a part of all our identity matrices and that is why I mention time, space and movement. There is no fixed sociometry, it changes and moves all the time. That is why a sociogram is something that ‘measures’ a moment, it shows the relations in one group at a specific moment in time and point in space. We can make a sociogram one day and tomorrow it will change. But it is also a question of what we do with the sociogram. This is why I think it is better when a sociogram is not just done on paper but with action and movement. I remember once my mother, who worked as an English teacher in a primary school, called me to intervene in a class where she was the teacher. She had a problem because the school psychologist did a sociogram and just gave ‘the results’ to the class. It created more conflict and more destructive behaviour, because the dynamics of the group were just thrown back at the group using fixed roles. Roma children and poor children were alienated. There were also a few stars in the class, some of them because of their grades, although mainly because of their higher status in society. I could not intervene because I was not a part of the education and school system, but I learned then that it is very important to find a way to teach sociometry to primary and secondary school teachers,
as well as how to deal with peer bullying and harassment from the perspective of sociopsychodrama.
After that, journalists from a very famous teen magazine in Serbia asked me to come to their TeenTalk Conference where they wanted me to talk about bullying and harassment among young people. They told me they would like the talk to be interactive but that there would be more than 80 teenagers (aged from 12 to 18) and they were not sure that they would want to do anything. My first thought was to do sociometry. I started speaking and said that I did not like speaking from behind a desk, so I moved to the front. We were in an amphitheatre and they were all sitting around me. I told them that I was very curious about this issue, about peer bully ing and harassment and that, if they are OK with it, I would like them to move in response to this question: Have you ever experienced bullying or harassment, either as a victim or a witness? If not, they can remain sitting. What happened is that all of them stood up and came to me, because there was no one unfamiliar with this kind of experience. Further sociometric questions were about deeper understanding of different aspects of bullying and harassment. With sociometry, we were all part of it and they were all very happy to share their experiences through action – living
sociometry. I know that war and violence are part of their (and my) social matrix, in a transgenerational way, but also through recent history. We are all together in that experience from which we need to get out, to grow and develop.
That is why we worked through the next sociometric questions and stayed there for most of the time we had left until the end of the debate and panel. The questions were, who would like to try out the role of victim, the role of bully and the role of bystander? So, the group split into three groups, they exchanged important messages and role reversed from their positions to other positions that were present. By the end we had found that, as a group, most support and work needs to be done for bystanders, so that they can help bring more peace and integration both for victim and bully. We had a very long sharing afterwards.
Two years after this event I created a program with my colleague Lidija Vasiljevic for the Serbian Ministry of Education on this subject that was accepted. I could start teaching people who work in schools how to do sociometry more efficiently and how to try to make changes with role reversal and by empowering bystanders of peer bullying and harassment. Gently, with the action way of using sociometry, one can do many things to improve human relationships. I want to point out that tolerance, democracy and peace need to be taught from a very early age. When I say gently, I also mean that we need to create a spontaneous atmosphere in order to be able to explore and work on living sociometry. There are so many ways we can do this, but not if it freezes the spontaneity, which is the key factor for working with groups in sociopsychodrama. “Sociometry can well be considered the cornerstone of a still underdeveloped science of democracy”. (Moreno, 1953)

Sociopsychodrama through examples
Work in the former Yugoslavia region.

When I was nine years old, my parents got divorced and, at the same time, Yugoslavia fell apart and the civil war started. Later on I worked as a psychodrama (and sociodrama) trainer and teacher in Slovenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia. When I was 17 years old, NATO bombing started in my hometown, Novi Sad, and my country, Serbia. I was coming back from my extracurricular activities (drama classes where we acted in Serbian and French) with my colleagues and classmates. Until that evening, I did not believe that there was a chance that we could be bombed by the USA and other members of NATO. So, as someone who has lived in a country tormented by war and as someone who has been bombed, I understand the development of my complementary role in the last 15 years. For me, a complementary role to the role of a person who experienced war and bombing is the role of the pacifier and the one that sees peace by peaceful means. Here’s an anecdote with peace theorist and future researcher Professor Jan Oberg, a student and collaborator of Johan Galtung, the founder of peace theory. I met him at his lecture about peace theory at the Faculty of Politics in Belgrade, Serbia in 2016. He talked about many things regarding society. One of the things he asked us was to think about why this society that we live in was built in such way that it has more monuments dedicated to war rather than peace. I found that a sociodramatic question that could be asked in different ways in different cultures. As the only psychologist and sociopsychodramatist among students and teachers of political sciences I was an alien at his lecture. After the lecture, he and I went to talk over a cup of coffee about sociopsychodrama and my interest in peace studies and non-violent conflict resolution. He asked me what I would do if I were among world politicians who are thinking of activation of the nuclear bomb. I told him I would ask them to reverse roles with the nuclear bomb. He was astonished that our method could have such a strong effect.
I would like to share here one specific work from a training group that I worked with. This work started from the group and ended with a group, so we could say it was socio-psycho-sociodrama. The group in which this specific work took place had members from former Yugoslavia.
It was almost the end of an intermediate training group, one of our last meetings. There was silence in the group and I suggested that we put a chair in the middle of the circle to see if there was anyone who wished to role reverse with the silence. Group members started moving to action. Then, one trainee from Bosnia and Herzegovina, from the city of Mostar, started crying from the role of the silence. I asked her how she connected her silence with herself personally or with something from her identity matrix. She responded that there was much silence in her own family and that she would like to work on it. We moved from the group to the scene. We started from the here-and-now and went back to her childhood and the silence that was present in her family. She was very sad and angry with her parents, who were silent and telling her and her brother that they should not confront the children who were bullying and harassing them because they were Bosnians. To explain the context better, they live in the part of the town that belonged after the war to Croats, and they are Bosnians and Muslims. So they were been bullied a lot by their peers and would come home very upset by whatever happened when they were playing. My trainee especially felt very much excluded. But both of her parents would advise her and her brother not to confront the bullies, nor would they go and talk with the parents about the situation. The scene seemed very stuck at one point and it seemed as if we were confronting something much bigger, something that caused silence and fear and sadness in her parents, so I doubled. She said that war caused the silence and started speaking about
how her mother would wash white clothes and put them on the balcony and how neighbours would throw things at the freshly clean clothes, saying horrible things. She also remembered how her mother never said anything but would just take the clothes down and wash them again. Her father too was silent. I suggested putting behind her parents the role of the war and asked her if she wished to address it. At that moment, I looked at all the members of the group and understood that they too might want to say something to the war, since all of us have been affected by it, recently and transgenerationally. All group members accepted this suggestion and stood in the scene with her expressing their feelings, experiences and thoughts about war. After that we did the sharing and processing.
Even now, the group sometimes reflects on this work because it was deeply meaningful and represented the macro level of our society in this micro cosmos of our training group. I thought very much after this work, and still do, that a lot more reconciliation work needs to be done here in the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and that people need to work through traumas that have never truly been worked through. Even in the war in the 1990s, part of the problem arose because no one from the different national entities had worked through their traumas from the Second World War and so much conflict had stayed in the social matrix unresolved. So, with strong media manipulation, these different nations could stir up old conflicts and start working against each other, even though they had been part of the same country for a long time. Of course, this former Yugoslavia war story is much more complex, I am giving just one perspective of the manifold layers. However, I believe
that reconciliation and conflict resolution, and work on transgenerational trauma are much needed in this region.

Work With roma adolescents

When I was a child, my grandfather would take me to a place in town that our government at that time had created. Nobody went there except for Roma people. Local people called the place Bangladesh, and it was on the outskirts of my home town, Novi Sad. We would go there to pick up his friend Milan, who worked with my grandfather in our vineyard and fruit yard. At that time, my grandfather used to have a white Lada Riva, a Russian car, and many children would run after us.
It was a completely new situation for me. We would always get many sweets and chocolates from my grandmother and clothes to take to Bangladesh when we went to meet Milan. She would say, give this to Milan’s children, they do not have as much as we do. So I would have this task to take sweets, clothes and chocolates and give them to children in Bangladesh and to Milan’s children. He had three children, two daughters and a son who was mentally challenged. I remember how we would play and I was a little bit shy but they were so relaxed and so I could relax with them. We would jump into hay and lay down eating the sweets together. I also remember how their house was a little bit different from others in this settlement. Later I learned from my grandfather that he did not think that it was fair that the government made only one-room houses for each Roma family, so he helped Milan build another room where they could have a kitchen and dining table.
These stories came into my mind when I started thinking of the project I worked on, created by CARE International. It was a project supporting Roma girls to go to school and to continue their education. Roma people were part of my social matrix from a very early age and I never had the prejudices of others, thanks to my grandparents. I also very much liked Gypsy music because of my mother and grandmother, who used to listen to Russian Gypsy music. I realised how the role of Gypsy child is a part of my matrix of identity and how understanding a child from a difficult economic background is a part of my transgenerational perspective, and in that way also part of my identity matrix.

The CARE International project mainly focused on creating a performance about the discrimination against Roma girls in schools. It used Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. My contract was to work with a large group of Roma adolescents from two different towns in Vojvodina, the northern region of Serbia. The other task I had was to have a support psychodrama group for the group of Roma adolescents from Novi Sad. My first condition was that if I work with these groups, they should not be homogenous, but have non-Roma adolescents so we can see the macro perspective in the microcosm of our groups. Project organisers agreed with my request.
In the large group, which aimed to be the primary goal of the project (to extract stories that would build the performance), we did a lot of sociometry and played drama games. I remember how group members spoke in many different languages, saying the same words, and how this was important to them as adolescents. We could hear the same words in Serbian, Hungarian and Roma. When it came to finding the stories, it was more difficult, but through games and strong support from my colleagues and me, the stories emerged. Very personal, very strong stories. My belief was that, since group members came to the main group through supporting groups, they could more easily share in main group.
The small psychodrama group that I led taught me things at different levels.
I learned that I needed to change my perception of the role of psychodrama director and facilitator of group process in order to make true contact with group members. Specifically, I had to become much closer to this group of adolescents if I wanted them to stay and work. For example, I would share my cigarettes with them and we would smoke together at the school window where we were provided a workspace.
That room was very dirty and so the school thought we should clean it before we started working. After a few sessions, I talked about this to the managers of the project, explaining that in a certain way cleaning this room was a repetition from the group’s social matrix. Most Roma people in Serbia work for the public cleaning service and take out garbage. I thought that if we were working to support them in continuing their education, supporting them to make and create new roles that would help them lead different lives, the school and the workshop organisers needed to treat them differently. No-one was interested in my opinion, so I proposed that we move to my psychotherapeutic office, even though it was not a part of the project. So we started working in a clean space where group members could come and be free of their usual roles and to do and share what they wanted.
Throughout our sessions the group was ambivalent about receiving education on one side while earning money on the other. When we started working, a lot of them talked about how pointless school is when you can earn money directly after primary school. I used techniques from art therapy and very simple warm-ups. One of the main activities was an empty chair that brought up a lot of work and many encounters in this group. During the course of the work, in both the large group (for preparing the performance) and in the smaller, support group, the students’ attitude toward school and learning started to change, especially within the female part of the group. Non-Roma adolescents were also very cooperative and supportive.
Together, they also created a performance as the Theatre of the Oppressed that played in many schools and at many festivals all over the country. Our result was very good, most of the girls from our groups went on with their education and enrolled in either secondary school or pursued other forms of education.
I encountered some issues that were impossible to resolve without working through the whole system, although this project did not have such an aim or the resources necessary. One day, after our group session finished, a boy from the group approached me saying that his parents have found him a wife and that he has to get married, although he did not want to. He asked for my help to stop the wedding. I could not help him, so I talked to others from the project, but there was no solution. Arranged marriages are part of the Roma social matrix and if we wanted to do something about it we would have to work with everyone in order to understand it. Roma people have been excluded from this society for many years without the economic support available to others and their life span is much shorter, so if they did not marry at an early age and have children it might present a risk to them as a community. This small example is an illustration of the wider economic imbalance faced by the Roma.
During the period of Yugoslavia’s existence many Roma people had jobs, although they became unemployed when the country fell apart. I remember at this point my grandfather’s friend Milan, who got an apartment from the state during the Yugosla via period. My grandfather told him that he would end up selling the apartment and going back to Bangladesh because there were no Roma in the part of town where the flat was. And what my grandfather said happened: Milan moved back to worse conditions in Bangladesh to be with his own people.
To work on integration with people who have different cultural conserves and different cultural contexts, one needs to role reverse with that cultural conserve in order to understand it. To be able to integrate two different communities, one needs to understand that it is an encounter between two different cultural contexts, where there are some things that are similar and some differences. Both need to be taken into consideration. With the work we do as sociodramatists and psychodramatists, we need to help create and then explore a space between these two worlds, which might struggle to communicate, we need to create a new space where a new cultural conserve can start to develop. That is integration in a democratic way. Other methods are closer to assimilation.

Work With Women With disabilities

In the project where I was hired to work as a psychodramatist with women with disabilities, the aim was to work through issues of sexuality and femininity. I also requested that we work with a group that consisted of women with and without disabilities, so that we could see this issue through the role of women in society. My request was accepted and we built the project. One part of the project was having a sociopsychodrama group that would work through issues of sexuality and feminin ity. Other elements were lectures about the history of sexuality and writing a play about this work. A member of this psychodrama group was a novelist who had the task of writing a play. Every member of the group signed a statement saying that they were happy that this novelist would use the work from the psychodrama group as inspiration for writing the play.
We started the group by taking the role of the part of the body that would best represent their sexuality and femininity. They also took a role of the part of the body that would be the worst for it from their perspective. This warm-up brought the social matrix very quickly into our work and, from that moment, we knew as a group that we would work hand in hand with both identity and social matrix.
One of the main warm-ups that we worked through for many sessions was some thing I learned from my art therapy training, called ‘cultural mapping’. I always adapted this warm-up when working with different groups. In this particular project and group, we called it “the relationship between society and female sexuality”. First, I started with guided imagery, so they could imagine their life as one big boulevard on which they were walking. Boulevard life has many side streets, one way streets, crossroads, billboards, and flashing adverts with different messages for women in general, and specifically women with disabilities, about femininity and female sexuality. I gave the women different newspapers and magazines so they could create a collage out of these messages, which would show how society was forming their sexuality and femininity. They also had to think not only about society, but also about their identity matrix, i.e. family and peer group messages that influenced their perception of themselves. Some of these messages were stimulating and supportive, some were difficult and limiting. This warm-up was so important for the group that in the next meetings we only worked with collages, using sociopsychodrama. These collages, created by group members, encouraged consisted of different elements and
different stories that were intertwined between identity and social matrix.

There was a wonderful lesson that a blind woman gave when she joined our group and shared her experience. Until then there had only been women with motor disabilities or women without disabilities, but we did not have anyone who had a sensory disability. I helped this woman build her cultural map collage since she did not have a personal assistant. She shared with the whole group how she never thought about what is seen or shown, because she had been blind since birth. For her, the only way to understand her sexuality and femininity was to pick something that felt nice to her. For example, if she picked a dress, she would feel it and then she would ask someone how it looks on her. We discussed this lesson and how it is important for all women (and men, I would say, but men were not part of this project) and how society forms roles for us which we think we must follow, being women, or women with disabilities. From this lesson and throughout the work, we would break the cultural conserves of femininity and sexuality and create new roles for each and every member individually.
The group also wrote a play, although it was never played or printed, that was about a protest choir where women sing about different aspects of how society mistreats them. A year ago, a few members of this group, together with the novelist, did create a protest choir. They sang in the streets and in front of government institutions, about the problems that women and men have in society. Members of this protest choir are male and female and come from both marginalised and from majority groups.
My personal story and relation to this work goes back to my childhood. We had neighbours near our summer house at the seaside who were both blind. The woman had lost her eyes during the Second World War and the man his eyesight through botched medical treatment. She was a historian and he was a pianist. As we met each summer there would be a gap of a year between our encounters. So, every time I came, the woman told me to come closer so that she could see how I had grown.
She would touch my face and say how every year I was more and more beautiful. I always wondered how she knew that I was getting bigger every year. When I went in the evenings to their house, she would tell me to turn on the lights. They truly fascinated me, so much that as a child I would go around the house with my eyes closed, trying to come closer to their role and to understand them better.
During my adolescence one of my best friends had a motor disability and my friends and I would go everywhere with her, even though at that time accessibility was very poor. We would even carry her, because she did not have a wheelchair back then. I remember how we would go to a very famous club and how I was happy that she was with me because I did not like to dance, so we could sit together.

Reflection about leadership roles and leadership styles

When we think and reflect on Moreno’s theoretical concepts, role theory, sociometry, concepts of co-creativity, co-responsibility, creativity and spontaneity, there is a question that comes into my mind. What does the role of leader mean in the context of working with groups? Is the term ‘leader’ good for those of us who work with groups? There is another question on which I ponder: what kind of leaders and leadership styles do we need in order to have spontaneity and creativity and be able to let groups have their own organic and democratic ways of working and under standing their processes?
Every role is changing and expanding. They are not fixed, rather they develop through relations with the other, through encounters and processes that happen in different matrices of identity. Every role is “held” by these matrices and since they are not fixed, roles too change. Moreno used the term director for the leader; when we look into the context of theatre and cinema, this role has changed over time.
Long ago, directors used to tell actors how to act, there was neither co-creativity nor co-responsibility. In ancient Greek theatre a prompter read the roles from a scroll of paper, only after that would the actor take the role. In the last century the process of creating roles in theatre and cinema has become more and more the process of co-creation and co-responsibility.
So, the roles of ‘leader’ or ‘director’ has been expanded and changed and is still changing in the context of working with groups. But we also need to keep in mind that the way we lead groups and how groups respond to that leadership often mirrors the macro plan of the social matrix that we are all part of, no matter what our roles are. As I write this, I start remembering how I did not like the term director when I started my training in psychodrama, because in Serbian the word direktor is equivalent to manager in English. There was always a lot of laughter surrounding this, but for me the language that was used to explain this role was part of the social matrix and a strong need for hierarchy and order.
In my development as a psychodramatist, and later as a sociopsychodramatist, I changed this idea and term to the term of facilitator or co-facilitator because I found it more suitable. This is a story of vertical versus horizontal leadership. To be able to work with groups and group processes and in order to be able to extract the group emergence, one needs to understand the concept of co-leading groups. Even if there are many people who are facilitators of the process, the whole time another co-facilitator or co-leader is the group itself. On the other hand, different groups, in their co-creation and co-responsibility with those who facilitate processes, create different types of process and different leadership styles. What they create and make is a matter of the relations between the participants, the group and the facilitator. And every now and then groups need to reflect and think about these questions. Even in our PERFORMERS project, in one of the first meetings we had the question “What kind of leader do we need?”. Together, as a group, we formulated an answer to this question, although there were facilitators and directors of the process. But this happens in every group, the question is how transparent is it? Questioning leadership roles and leadership styles also depends on the maturity of a group and the maturity of the social matrix the group belongs to.
Since the PERFORMERS group is international, the learning that is happening is cross-cultural, transcultural, and intercultural. We have a very different social matrix from the groups that are homogenous in terms of their backgrounds. Co-creation and co-responsibility is more fruitful and quicker than in some other groups. We have developed a culture of clear horizontal leadership where we have different roles, although everything changes constantly in relation to the group itself. So, we could easily say that the whole group leads the process and much co-facilitation happens in parallel. There is learning between different generations, different cultural conserves, different histories, experiences creating new ways of functioning as a group and giving new information to process facilitators.
If we want to be able to run groups in which spontaneity comes first and creativity can take place, where nothing is fixed, we need to understand that the group facilitator has the role of catalyser of the process. It is not that this role gives directions, but the group gives directions and facilitators follow it. Even with directions or warm-ups that someone in the role of facilitator gives, the next activity arises from the group response. This is why the process emerges all the time from co-creativity and co-responsibility. Of course, when people start working with groups, they need to feel safer in these roles, often taking a role they feel is safe. With time and experience, they change the role and shift to another position, adding new roles and creating more and more freely. As I write this I am thinking of my students and myself when I was a student. I needed to rely on the images of roles of the people whose groupwork I liked in order to start doing it on my own, but over time things changed. Of course, both in sociodrama and psychodrama we also have ethical considerations, mainly in terms of not harming anyone and keeping in mind good intentions, without misusing methods of sociodrama, psychodrama and sociometry.
Having in mind different contracts with groups we facilitate, our roles of leaders and co-facilitators change. It is not the same when we work in an organisational setting, in a therapeutic community, in a factory or in a training group. The relations between the facilitator, contract and group also defines which roles we are going to take on. These are important issues to take into consideration and to reflect upon when we think of what kind of leadership roles and leadership styles we need.
Moreno said, “The most spontaneous person in a room is the director”. Even if there is a clear role of a director or facilitator in the group, it is not that role that is the only one which serves that purpose. Anyone from the group, and the group itself, can do something for the group and in the group that changes this position. Facilitating the group process also means questioning different cultural conserves in this context and seeing if we are repeating something or creating something new.
In Who Shall Survive?, Moreno wrote “If God came to the Earth again, he’d come as a group.” (Moreno, 1953.). My understanding of this quote is what I reflect on in this part of my paper. I believe Moreno meant that power is in the group, not the individual, or to be more precise, collectivity and being in groups is more powerful than being alone. We can easily see how this is important today, when we have the Covid pandemic throughout the world. We can also see that the role of leader and facilitator of group processes empowers the individuals to be in groups and to help groups organise on their own to the best of their abilities.
Recently, when I started writing this article, I had a dream. In my dream, a very famous therapist from Serbia came to me and asked: “Am I a heart?” My response to her was: “No, you are not, but the group is the heart and you live in the group”.
It is important for a human being to understand their individuality, but it is more important to understand that every human being is part of a group, something bigger than themselves. In this way, the role of leader and the role of the group that he or she leads, consists of many roles: teacher, student, historian, anthropologist, group, facilitator, co-creator, agent of change, producer, mother, father, etc. All the roles that are part of different matrices of identity (social and cosmic) are a part of this process. Being a leader and having a style of facilitating a group is a process that lasts forever. It is a very open cultural conserve within the ethical context of sociodrama, psychodrama and sociometry.

References

Kristoffersen, B. (2014). Jacob Levy Moreno’s encounter term: A part of a socialdrama. Zeitschrift Für Psychodrama Und Soziometrie, 13(S1), 59-71. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11620-014-0222-4.
Kristoffersen, B. (2017). Sociometry in democracy. Zeitschrift Für Psychodrama Und Soziometrie, 17(1), 109-120. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11620-017-0423-8.
Moreno, J. L. (1943). Sociometry and the Cultural Order. Sociometry, 6(3), 299-344.
doi:10.2307/2785184.
Moreno, J. L. (1953). Who Shall Survive? Foundations of sociometry, group psychotherapy and sociodrama. New York: Beacon House.
Moreno, J. L. (1977). Psychodrama (4.th ed., Vol. I). Beacon, NY: Beacon House.
Zuretti, M. (2007) Psychodrama in the Presence of Whales. British Journal of Psychodrama and Sociodrama Vol. 22, Number 1, pp. 19 – 32

About the author.

Jana Damjanov, Master of Clinical Psychology; psychodrama and sociodrama trainer, supervisor, and psychotherapist.
Author of chapters on Moreno’s role theory, psychodrama and sociodrama in several professional books and textbooks. She applies sociodrama and psychodrama in education, supervision, evaluation, research, and group psychotherapeutic work, particularly in the context of cultural and collective trauma in the former Yugoslav region.
Doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences and Humanities Program at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad and co-author of Discovering the Languages of Peace: Handbook of Sociopsychodrama (2023).
Email address: jancheed@gmail.com