Psychodocudramatics

Abstract

This chapter examines the rise of “psychodrama,” with its insistence on the importance of performing one’s own traumatic past, in the growing field of military psychiatry. Developed by the Austrian-American psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, psychodrama was a technique that required both acting and reenacting, both imagination and memory. Moving beyond the hospital, drama teams increasingly embraced activities performed in specific sites of trauma—a psychotherapeutic turn that anticipated major developments in documentary film.