Psychodrama with Children

Healing children through their own creativity

Hanna Kende

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134868230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Hanna Kende uses her wealth of experience to explain how psychodrama can allow psychotherapists to fundamentally change their relationships with children presenting with psychosocial, mental, or behavioral problems. Based on Kende's extensive and wide-ranging knowledge, Psychodrama with Children explores the origins and roots of psychodrama, and uses detailed case studies to show how psychodramatists can encourage groups of children to draw upon their natural creativity as a force for healing. The method draws on a rich theoretical base starting from the foundational work of Moreno and Adler.The method is applicable to a wide range of children with varied symptoms (psychosomatic problems, distractibility, hyperactivity, inhibition, capable children performing poorly at school, etc.). By creating a warm climate of reciprocal tolerance and acceptance, psychodramatists allow children to express themselves freely in a group of their peers and to reshape their negative self-image. Psychodrama lets children use their natural language of play to mobilize their creative imagination, and to express their anxieties, conflicts and problems in a symbolic mode. This approach helps children heal through their own creativity. Psychodrama with Children will be of interest to psychodramatists, dramatherapists and child psychotherapists, as well as psychologists, psychiatrists and other child and adolescent mental health professionals.

1
Impressionistic Introduction

A recollection in three voices

At a distance of thirty years, we will call up a common melody. The first soloist is a former co-therapist, my partner in psychodrama, Claude Lepineux; the second is a young participant in those long-ago workshops, a girl who decided to call herself Shanti. The third soloist, as you must have surely guessed already, is none other than myself.

Together, the three of us have tried to evoke the memory of the Psychodrama Workshop that functioned for two decades as part of a Consultancy for the French Ministry of Justice, welcoming children from 7 to 12 years of age who were considered “at risk” because of their seriously underprivileged circumstances and who, in addition to their disadvantaged social milieu, presented with major individual psychological problems. Characterized by distrust, lack of self-confidence, and difficulties in connection, these children, as will be evident in Shanti’s narrative, had no self-esteem, devalued themselves, and at times even suffered from self-destructive tendencies.

Over time, we developed the working methods of this workshop, in the light of our studies, our readings, our analytic and psychodramatic training, but above all based on our common experience of what the children gave us the opportunity to learn.

To the best of our ability, we listened to each child’s secret melodies, and this made it possible for them to listen to them in each other. We gave them our attention and tried to resonate in unison with them in order to overcome their inhibitions and liberate themselves from their internal imprisonment, from their false selves, from their lack of identity.

To be able to hear both the melody of the ensemble and the magnificent voice of each soloist, the group therapist or facilitator of the psychodrama needed to have a kind of perfect pitch. This is how Shanti spoke about her participation some twenty years later:

I, too, discovered to my surprise that young children had something to say, that they possessed an inner world.

So let us first hear from my psychodramatist colleague, Claude.

Claude

I would like to touch upon two different aspects of the workshop: that of ritual and that of individualization. The workshop is a ritualized space, and children’s psychodrama is a particular space where rituals that have been developed over years take on a structuring quality for the group, for each child, and also for the therapists. Let us begin with the role of ritual.

Role of the ritual: alienating or liberating

It is hard to provide an unequivocal response to this question. Ritual may have a double aspect. It can alienate the individual or the group:

Ritual is alienating if the rules do not carry intrinsic meaning, if they have lost their original signification. By contrast, in our workshop rituals had a triple meaning – they were carriers of signification, of questioning, and, ultimately they were called upon to resolve personal problems; they took on a globally liberating role.

I would not dare to claim that this liberation takes place every time, allowing us to surmount a painful or anxiety-ridden past, but such liberation certainly constitutes the preamble to our lived experiences, our freedom, and our subsequent develop ment. The road taken, the evolution of an individual, is never entirely graspable … But what I do affirm as a guiding principle of the workshop – based on my internal conviction – can be summarized in a single sentence: What is important is not what has happened to us but the way that we succeed in making use of it.

From this perspective, the habits and rituals of the workshop were at once useful and encouraging, unlike obsessional rituals or the alienating rites of certain sects. When the ritual constitutes an end unto itself, it loses meaning and leads to depersonalization and alienation. In the potential space that constituted our workshop, rituals retained their meaning. It was in the spirit of Jean Cocteau’s quotation, that we made use of different rituals:

1. the welcoming ritual of drawing together around a table. This created an intermediate space for each of us between the everyday world and the psychodrama. These generally calm and collected moments facilitated the emergence of feelings and emotions.
2. the ritual of conversation through the intermediary layer of the drawing. Beyond their creative accomplishment, children’s creations had a double function, to calm their anxieties, fears, and aggression, while at the same time mobilizing their internal energies. I want to emphasize this, because I believe that anyone who limits himself to emphasizing difficulties and problems is not a good therapist.
3. the ritual of elaborating the story. The group sits in a circle. The rule: don’t repeat a story you saw on television, or that you know or have heard. Every child chooses his/her own role, the child who suggested the story selects first.
4. the ritual of beginning the psychodramatic play. Three knocks signify the group’s entry into the imaginary world and also its departure from that world. At the end of the play, each actor reaffirms his/her own identity and is applauded.
5. the communal ritual of eating lunch together. The communal meal signifies the replenishment and fortification of each individual and concludes the morning (we might term this the chicken-French fries ritual).

The functions of the rituals listed above:

• they provide orientation in space and time;
• they allow for the modest and discreet expression of anxieties, fears, suffering and pleasure;
• they mobilize internal forces (the unconscious is not an exclusively chaotic or malicious domain, but is also rich in resources);
• they boost self confidence, encourage respect for others, facilitate listening to each other, and strengthen healthy narcissism or the sense of self worth.

The idea of the child recognized as carrying values and whose word inspires respect is a deep and essential one for these children in the throes of multiple difficulties.

Mimetic violence and individuation

I would also like to analyze the functioning of the workshop from an entirely different point of view, based on the conceptualization of René Girard, a psychologist who was considered to be a dissident and marginalized by Parisian psychoanalysts, and is now a University Professor at Stanford. In his interpretation, desire has a mimetic origin. He challenges the formula according to which the desire of a subject has to do with a given object. Human beings are capable of desiring anything whatsoever. Desire is, by nature, mimetic, that is, it is addressed to the object of its rival, in other words, the desire of its enemy. It is the mimetic origin of desire (I want what the other wishes to possess) that would explain the origin of violence.

According to René Girard, “to act positively, one has to reflect negatively” (René Girard, 1972, p. 82). Seen from the side of the individual or society, it is not difference that sets off conflict, sometimes followed by violence, but lack of differentiation. The less differentiated we are the more we share the same desire – like twins. And the subjects of twin desire oppose each other in all things because nothing distinguishes them. Why am I speaking of this twin violence? Because the children in the workshop are often the victims of real or symbolic violence and in this symbolic or potential space that we have been able to provide them, they have succeeded, or at least I hope they have, in going beyond the undifferentiated state of personal and familial confusion to become differentiated, individuated, so that they are able to separate off their personality from the fused familial entity. To summarize:

The basic unstated idea of the workshop is that every child is capable of solving his/her problems by virtue of his/her own sources of energy. Each person’s individual task consists of creating and perfecting herself starting from her own history while battling against numerous difficulties that she will have to confront.

The workshop and the psychotherapists play the role of catalysts in promoting the differentiation of the children and the recreation of their self.

Shanti

“Is Shanti your assumed name?”

A Brahmin told me one day that this is the name of my soul. For me, the Workshop was an area of freedom.

What appealed to me right away at the workshop is that you could create stories there without constraints, which you made up together (or alone). It was fun to listen to the others tell about the plays that we would go on to stage afterward, because I found it validating to play out stories that people had invented themselves. For myself, I learned to express myself more freely, for I can recall that at the beginning it was impossible for me to take the floor or to speak in my own name. I always had to ask for permission in order to know that what I was about to say made sense. In this way, you learned to listen to yourself and to the others.

I also discovered that we carry inside ourselves an imaginary world that we can let surge forth, thanks to speech. Playing made me aware that you can be creative and inventive.

In this workshop, I discovered attentive adults who were curious to learn what the children thought. They tried to understand them, but without asking them questions. In fact, because of my problems at school, they had recommended to my mother that a psychologist follow me. She was charming enough, but it was a real nightmare, because she absolutely wanted me to talk about my problems. After every session, I told her I didn’t want to come back. She always insisted.

Then, after a year, I stopped. But since I had failed at school for a second time, I had to go back to the psychologist.

At the workshop I had the sense of being surrounded by people who only wanted to help us and wanted what was best for us. They respected us as individuals (they never asked us questions about our private, personal lives). They were there to listen to us and not to judge us, casting a different light on the children that we were, recognizing our intellectual and artistic qualities, even though we were all failing in school. Moreover, the sense of being recognized by intelligent adults who appreciated me and accepted me allowed me to reconcile myself with the social group, with humanity.

Even if I’m unable to explain today what happened, I know that this experience was fundamental to my self-realization. I was able to regain confidence in myself there and to blossom intellectually. I left the workshop with the certainty that I was a creative and imaginative individual.

In addition, the later choices I have made emerged from this experience. Thus, I spent time at Rudolf Steiner institutions because I wanted to have contact with children who are different, whom I could help in turn.

Shanti is currently working for the French educational system. She runs special classes, providing help for illiterate immigrant children of different ages to prepare them to attend “normal” classes.

H.K.

As the third voice, I will attest to what has already been evoked above, that these children who had failed at school, were poorly accepted in their families, and had no confidence in themselves, did not know the extent to which they were gifted. They suffered from a major sense of inferiority and even considered themselves, as Shanti expressed it, to be worthless.

The principal changes that took place in the workshop.

Resilience

In her own concise style, Shanti already told us that the experience she had at the workshop changed her self image and her sense of self worth. She discovered the richness of her psychological potentialities. There, she discovered qualities in herself that she had not even suspected. And she was not the only one … The characteristics of Shanti’s journey are as follows:

1. Artistic blossoming. It isn’t only at the workshop that her acting talents were manifested. Invited by a friend whose father was a theater director, Shanti joined the Bob Wilson troupe for a couple of weeks. The troupe was in the middle of a tour across France, but Shanti ended up rejecting the offer of a long tour for fear of jeopardizing her school grades and failing her baccalaureate examinations.
2. Her intellectual capacities became unblocked. The poor student about whom we spoke, who had to repeat two primary grades, was admitted after her baccalaureate to a hypokhâgne level preparatory program for advanced studies. After completing her studies to become a literature professor (French, Japanese), she decided to teach special classes in the French national education system in order to help children of immigrants of various backgrounds and ages.

Taking her inspiration largely from her experiences at the workshop, she has developed a method for working with children who are behind in school or virtually illiterate, in which she takes into consideration each child’s individual circumstances – country and environment of origin – and potential, his or her intellectual and imaginative capacities. She offers teaching that is individualized and adapted to the needs of each child. She has the deep conviction that all children have the desire to learn and that it is the teacher’s responsibility to guide them along the path to knowledge and freedom.

Social sense or group solidarity

Social sense develops by way of the capacity to identify with others and share with them. In the group, children were able to share their socio-affective problems and discover the values of the other children. They were attentive to each other and shared their emotions. To come back to Shanti as the main character in this introduction (you will encounter many other cases in the course of this book), her relationship to the other children was one of acceptance, mutual assistance, and support (for example, see Bruno, Chapter 6). Over the years, she took on a special place. When she returned to the group as a lycée student, she was regarded as an assistant facilitator.

Claude mentioned the problem of aggression in the workshop. Shanti experienced the group as being non-aggressive. Her perception of the group as nonaggressive corresponds to her own capacity to fend off and appease conflicts and to cheerfully overcome tensions.

Basic trust, the primordial we (Ur-Wir)

According to Adler, the sense of unconditional trust originates in the primary dyadic relationship. For Shanti, the workshop (the positive regard of intelligent adults) was called upon to compensate for the original injury of an inadequate maternal relationship. In his writings, the psychoanalyst Michael Balint expressed the hope that psychoanalysis could overcome such deficits through a corrective relationship, but in the workshop, the correction was a common task shared by the psycho-dramatists and the group. (For development of this topic, se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• 1 Impressionistic introduction: A recollection in three voices
• 2 Jacob Moreno, the God Syndrome, and children’s psychodrama
• 3 Modification of Morenian technique in Adlerian psychodrama with children
• 4 Before psychodrama starts
• 5 Phases of children’s psychodrama
• 6 Preventive and therapeutic functions of children’s psychodrama
• 7 Group therapy with abused children
• 8 Behavioral problems
• 9 The role of the psychodramatists
• 10 The role of the group in the socialization of the children
• 11 Fairy tale and therapy
• 12 Methods for dramatizing the fairy tale
• 13 Virtual world and psychodrama
• 14 Final word on the function of psychodrama with children
• Bibliography
• Index