The field of psychology is in motion. Numerous proposals that go hand in hand with the new trends linked to positive psychology, personal growth, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapies, coaching and research into the variables that influence not only the development of psychopathological symptoms or mental illnesses, but also aspects associated with well-being, happiness and optimal performance states such as flow or self-realization, concepts closer to the humanist field, occupy the main headlines of workshops, Twitter and Instagram timelines and university study programs. This movement is not exempt from a set of observations and criticisms, many of them valid, related to simplistic and misleading concepts in psychology, but that we can review it at another time.
Beyond the complexities that surround the theoretical and methodological conceptions of some of these new ways of doing psychology, it is undoubtedly striking how more and more psychologists are challenged to abandon certain traditional spaces such as the interior of an office or the corridors of a hospital, school and / or company to occupy new and challenging fields of work, which in turn demands new responses that amplify traditional forms of understanding and intervention. The idea of being able to transcend forms conceived and established, to generate in people (and psychologists) spontaneous and creative alternatives in their lives, forms of knowledge from the encounter with the other and action, not only with the word, constitute one of the fundamental precepts of Psychodrama.
Already during his first elaborations, the founder of Psychodrama Jacobo Levi Moreno appeared this idea. In a hypothetical encounter with the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud in 1912 while he was giving a lecture on dreams in Vienna, he tells him: "Well Doctor Freud, I start where you leave things. You see your patients in the artificial frame of your office. I find them on the street, at home, in their natural environment. You analyze your dreams. I try to give people courage to dream again. I teach people how to play God."
"The divine spark" is the term to which Moreno referred. We are all carriers of a creative capacity that gives us the constant possibility of enriching ourselves and our relationships. Many times it is considered a creative act based on its originality, but another important characteristic that defines it is the adequacy of that act to its context. In order to access this potential, psychodramatic work is characterized by generating conditions that allow space to be given to spontaneity, which means responding from within, it comes from the word "sponte" that refers to "free will". Once we allow ourselves to promote and develop our spontaneity, it is like giving air to the fire, it ignites our ability to create new alternatives, new discourses, new ways of dealing with me and with the other.
In these times of movement, challenges, and new objectives in the practice of psychology, psychodrama constitutes a theoretical and methodological framework that allows us to understand and work with people their potential to develop their spontaneity and creativity from the encounter with themselves, the other and their transcendence. Its dynamic and relational character, which involves the participation not only of the word but of the body, movement and emotion in the action, offers a novel experiential methodology with a structure that goes beyond the nowadays popular dynamics and group games(many of them with their roots in Psychodrama and the Gestalt School) , beyond the traditional psychotherapeutic model of individual attention and "cure" through the word, to become a form of exploration and expansion of our being through the staging of our lives, conflicts and / or dreams, in order to revitalize, understand and transform them. This is how Moreno defines it, in his clearest expression about what Psychodrama is, "a method that probes the truth of the soul through action."