The scene: a small circular stage in the basement of Washington’s St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. The cast: a group of inmates. Under white lights suggesting harsh reality, 19-year-old Susan thrashes about in a temper tantrum. She once used these tantrums to win attention from her widowed mother or her uncle. Now, as the stage lighting turns slowly to green, another inmate enters in the role of her father’s ghost. The two decide to go away together, and the lights are blacked out to indicate the passage of time.
Susan was the star of a “psychodrama,” a psychiatric technique in which mental patients are encouraged to act out their dreams and fantasies. The plot is made up by the participants, with the help of an attending psychologist. In Susan’s “play,” after a brief blackout, she reappeared with her “father” under grey lights representing purgatory. The audience served as the jury, and another patient acted Susan’s aunt and shrilled accusations at her. Soon Susan and her ghostly father went to hell where, under flickering red lights, the damned stood around mute, each in a shell of loneliness and unable to communicate with the others. Next stop was heaven: under a peaceful blue, “God” sat on his throne surrounded by angels, and Susan met a boy friend who had died young.
Susan liked heaven so much that Psychologist-Producer James Enneis feared she might develop suicidal ideas, so he had the ghost father tell Susan that she could find a heaven on earth.
Emotionally Charged Lights. Georgia-born Psychologist Enneis, 34, studied psychodrama under its originator, Dr. Jacob L. Moreno, at Beacon, N.Y., was early impressed by the effect of lights on the actors. Where a director uses lights in a conventional theater to harmonize with the mood of the scene, Enneis found that he could control or even create emotions with different colored lights. His most vivid example: a staff assistant was acting under the emotionally charged red lights when a woman patient (going through a transference relationship) attacked her. Onstage, Enneis tried vainly to separate them, but an alert observer flicked the lights from red to blue. The assault stopped at once. Enneis now controls both the intensity and color of the lights himself.
Participants in a psychodrama group stand around the stage before each session, chatting with Enneis and among themselves to decide who shall be the first “star” and what aspects of life to portray. After the—y have attended a couple of sessions, they are usually surprisingly willing to go onstage and act out husband-and-wife fights or mother-and-daughter quarrels. Among recent patients was Joe, 24, who had felt unwanted and frustrated at home with an ineffective father and a hostile, aggressive, dominant mother. With another patient acting the part of his mother, Joe learned to express some of his bottled-up aggressions —and the substitute mother, herself a domineering type, learned to give Joe a selfless kind of help.
Another patient, 35, complained that when she tried to get a job on the outside, “they”stopped her. “They,” she explained, were “the Communists, the Nazis and the F.B.I.” After acting out some of her conflicts, she conceded that the police, at least, were her friends.
Neither Couch nor Stage. At St. Elizabeth’s, one of about a dozen U.S. mental hospitals where psychodrama is played, Enneis has worked with two groups of newly arrived patients (20 to 25 in each) who meet three times a week. Last week he began a twice-weekly psychodrama series with 100 patients who have been in the hospital five years or longer. Most of these had been hostile to the staff and to each other. Enneis hoped that giving them a chance to act out their hostilities would calm them down so that some could be discharged and the rest would become less troublesome patients.
Enneis does not see psychodrama as a panacea for the patients’ ills, but as a useful technique to help them gain insight into their own difficulties and enter more normal relationships with others. The most important part of recovery comes, he believes, after the patient has left the hospital and applies what he has learned there. “No one,” he says, “was ever cured on a couch or a stage.”
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