The Philosophy, Theory and Methods of J. L. Moreno

The Man Who Tried to Become God

John Nolte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134466641
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

J. L. Moreno, M.D., is recognized as the originator of sociometry and psychodrama, and was a prodigious creator of methods and theories of creativity, society, and human behavior. The methods and techniques he authored have been widely adopted; the theories and philosophy upon which the methods are founded have not, as they are frequently couched in language which is not easily understood. Moreno's ideas about group psychotherapy have pretty well gotten lost, and what he considered his greatest contribution, sociometry, gets paid superficial attention by most psychodramatists. Group psychotherapy and psychodrama are both widely practiced but often based on non-Morenean theory, likely due to the inaccessibility of Moreno's work.

This book outlines Moreno's early years (his religious phase), the philosophy on which the foundation of his methods are based, and a description of the three major methods Moreno originated: psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy. It provides a more systematic presentation of Moreno's work and presents his philosophy and theory clearer, more understandable manner.

Part I

The Religious Phase

It was in the early part of our century that a young man tried to become God. The place was Vienna; the period of his appearance was between 1908 and 1914. He made a deep impression upon his contemporaries. He had his gospel, his apostles, his apocrypha. The religious books in which his doctrine was expressed had profound reverberations throughout the intellectual world. The cruel wars and revolutions through which mankind has passed since have destroyed or dispersed most of the original witnesses, but some of them are still living and I am one of them.

—J. L. Moreno, The Autobiography of J. L. Moreno, MD

1 The Man in the Green Cloak

Vienna, just after the turn of the 19th century, was an exhilarating city in which to live—as long as you were a member of the well-to-do merchant class. Vienna was second only to Paris as a European center of culture and the arts, and an extraordinary profusion of intellectual and scientific productivity emerged in the city in the years just before and after the turn of the century. It was also the city of social movements, including Zionism, Austro-Marxism, German Nationalism, and Existentialism. Anti-Semitism was also rampant. Paris was known as the City of Lights, Vienna as the City of Dreams.¹

Anyone living in Vienna in the years between 1908 and 1914 might occasionally have come across a young man wearing a dark green cloak. One of the places where he frequently appeared was the Augarten, the grounds of the palace of Emperor Franz Joseph that served as a public park for the people of Vienna. This was a place where nannies and nursemaids took their young charges, and where older children often came to play.

A mysterious youth who came to be recognized as the Young Man in the Green Cloak could often be found sitting at the foot of a tree, making up fairy tales to tell the children who came to play in the Augarten. They gathered around him, eager to hear what wondrous story he would next invent. He never told the same story twice, and often he engaged the children in creating with him new stories or new versions of old stories. Moreover, he had this air of mystery about him. Nobody knew his name or where he lived. Though he might make known when his youthful audience would expect to see him again, he often showed up unannounced. He was like one of the characters from the fairy tales he told.

The Young Man in the Green Cloak was Jacob Moreno Levy, who would later rearrange his name to become J. L. Moreno, and whose methods, philosophy, and theories are the subject of this book. About 18 years old at the time of his engagement with the children in the Augarten, he had been emancipated from his family for several years, supporting himself by tutoring the children of bourgeois families of Vienna. In the Augarten, he not only told fairy tales. He engaged the children he met there in creative play. He saw himself as removing these children from their everyday drab surroundings (they were mostly children of the working class for whom Vienna could be and more often was a city of nightmares than the City of Dreams) and taking them bodily into a fairyland of unlimited wonder.

It was here, observing the spontaneity and creativity of children, that his theory linking spontaneity with creativity began to take shape. “In children,” Moreno says:

you see spontaneity in its living form. It is written all over the child, in his act-hunger, as he looks at things, as he listens to things, as he rushes into time, as he moves into space, as he grabs for objects, as he smiles and cries. In the very beginning, he sees no barrier in objects, no limits of distance, no resistance or prohibitions. But as objects hinder his locomotion and people respond to him with “no, no, no,” he starts on his reactive phase, still reaching out, but with growing anxiety, fear, tension, and caution. (1989a, p. 37)

Moreno later claimed that he was instigating a revolution among the children, a revolution against social stereotypes and class distinctions, a revolution for spontaneity and creativity. What he observed was that as children grow older, they became less spontaneous, less creative, more anxious and cautious. He wanted to teach them how to retain their spontaneity and remain creative in the face of society’s attempt to mold them into its templates.

THE RELIGION OF ENCOUNTER

Even if one did not frequent the Augarten, by 1914, the Man in the Green Cloak might have been seen in the company of one or more of his four close friends, all students at the University of Vienna. They were constantly walking the streets and roads of Vienna, always talking, always engaging with everyone they met along the way. Although they affected anonymity in their time, we now know their respective identities. The tall member of the group was Chaim Kellmer, a philosophy student. A man with many questions about life in general and his life in particular, he had come from Romania to the university to seek answers. Like Moreno, he, too, supported himself as a tutor. He was considered by many to be a wise person and many sought his counsel and advice.

When Moreno and Kellmer met, both found a deep kinship of spirit that initiated what Moreno later described as the Religion of Encounter. Three other like-minded students joined them to form a unique group. There was András Petö of Budapest, a medical student who eventually achieved renown for developing new methods of treating handicapped children. Jan Feda from Prague, who became a friend of Thomas Masaryk, founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, also became one of the group.

The third was Hans Brauchbar of Vienna, also a medical student who later moved to Russia and, in Moreno’s words, “disappeared.” These five comprised the total membership of the Religion of Encounter. They were indefatigable talkers, preoccupied with ideas about the nature of God and the Second Coming of Christ. In spite of their constant conversation, they were absolutely dedicated to the notion that their actions were far more meaningful than their words.

Moreno describes the group in his autobiography:

We were all committed to the sharing of anonymity, of living and giving, living a direct and concrete life in the community with all we met. We left our homes and families and took to the streets. We were nameless but were easily recognized by our beards and our warm, human, and gay approach to all comers. None of us would accept any money for the services we rendered to others, but we received many gifts from anonymous donors. (1989a, p. 42)

Vienna, in addition to being a hotbed for modernism in the arts, was a hotbed of movements. Nazism, Zionism, Communism, and Existentialism. Moreno and his group belonged to the latter. The first principle, he wrote, was the all-inclusiveness of being and the constant effort of maintaining the natural spontaneous flow of being from one moment to the next without interruption. The second principle was that all existing things are by nature good and blessed. Other ideas include the concept of the moment as a category in itself rather than as a function of past and future, and the notion of the situation, which is to say that we always find ourselves in a setting that has meaning for us and that challenges us or demands that we act. A further principle is spontaneity and creativity as the guides of ethical conduct rather than the social rules of cultural conserves.

In the pre–World War I years, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was becoming increasingly unstable and, as a result, hordes of people from its many nationalities poured into Vienna on their way to more promising countries. America and Palestine were particularly high among their destinations. These emigrants were most often poor and uneducated. Making their way through governmental bureaucracy was nearly impossible without help. Shelter and sustenance were often even more urgent problems.

The five members of the Religion of Encounter procured a house in central Vienna and opened it to all comers. They refused payment from those who found their way to the house and who seldom had the means to pay anyway. The House of Encounter not only provided food and shelter, but also helped the emigrants understand and fill out their emigration papers and deal with the government bureaucratic agencies. Moreover, the emigrants, far from their homes and native countries found much desired comfort in companionship and mutual emotional support. The house was supported entirely by donations received by Moreno and his friends.

In his autobiography, Moreno writes that he was amazed that so many people crowded into that house and shared with one another whatever they had, and did so without fighting or hard feelings. Every evening was a meeting time in which problems were discussed and any grievances were addressed. Later, Moreno would point to these meetings as the model for the encounter group movement that prevailed in America during the 1960s and 1970s.

MORENO AND THE CONCEPT OF GOD

From an early age, Moreno was intrigued with the concept of God. “The most famous person in the universe was God and I liked to be connected with Him” (1989a, pp. 19–20). He sometimes traced the origins of psychodrama, the best known of the several methods that he would originate, to an incident from his childhood. When he was about four years old, his parents were visiting friends on a Sunday afternoon, and he was playing with neighbors’ children in the basement of his house. “Let’s play God and his angels,” little Jacob suggested, and the other children agreed. They piled chairs upon an oak table that was in the basement to represent heaven, and Jacob chose to play God, climbing up to the highest level:

The children circled around the table, using their arms as wings, singing. One or two of the larger children held up the mountain of chairs we had assembled. Suddenly one of the children asked me, “Why don’t you fly?” I stretched my arms, trying it. A second later, I fell and found myself on the floor, my right arm broken. (1946b, p. 2)

The psychodrama of the fallen God. This was, as far as I can recall, the first “private” psychodramatic session I ever conducted. I was the director and protagonist in one. (1989a, p. 20)

Moreno experienced the first of two powerful mystical events when was 14. Late one night walking the streets of Chemnitz, where his parents had moved, he had what he called an epiphany. He found himself before a statue of Christ. As he thought about how Christ had lived his life, and how chaotic Moreno’s own then seemed, he realized that he had to make a decision. “The question was, how would I choose: was my identity the universe or was it with the particular family or clan from which I had sprung? I decided for the universe” (1989a, p. 22). This was what Jesus had done and for which he had paid the ultimate consequence. From that moment on, Moreno wrote, he began to believe that he was an extraordinary person with an extraordinary mission to fulfill through his life.

Moreno also formulated his struggle with the questions of existence this way:

I began to try to find meaning in an existence, which appears meaningless in itself. If there is nothing else in life except a dreamlike passing into nothing, at least we can protest against an unreasonable fate, an unpardonable sin, a mistake of the cosmos to have thrown us out here, into the desert of this planet, perceiving, feeling, thinking, without any chance or hope to become something which really matters. My quest therefore, was: “Am I, this perishable thing, a hopeless existence or am I at the center of all creation, of the entire cosmos?”

I asked myself: “Who is this me? A name? A bit of nothing, vanishing like a rainbow in the sky never to return? Or is this me the most real thing there is, the Creator of the world, the first and final being, the all-inclusive thing? In other words, am I nothing, or am I God?” (1972b, pp. 197–198)

The publishing of thoughts like this, after he had achieved some fame and stature as a psychiatrist and originator of the sociometric and psychodramatic methods, led to accusations of megalomania and accusations that he was delusional.

As a teenager, Moreno may have struggled more passionately perhaps than most of us with the questions that all of us ask at some time or another, those basic existential questions: “Who am I? Why am I here?” Moreno’s search may have been more profound than that of most young people his age. He read extensively:

Extensive and feverish reading of religious, philosophical, and esthetic literature set the internal, psychic scene for the decisive period to come. The reading of religious books centered around the Old and New Testaments, Saints Paul, Augustine, Origen, Benedict, Francis, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Fredrich Novalis, the Apocrypha, the Sohar and Jezirah, Blaise Pascal. Søren Kierkegaard’s writings were having great impact throughout Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I, too, fell under his spell. (1989a, p. 29)

He was also engrossed in philosophers, Spinoza, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, and novelists and poets, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, and Goethe. He found himself growing increasingly distressed by the works of all these “saints, prophets and geniuses.” It was not their ideas that were excellent and beautifully voiced, he said, but their behavior as individuals and as representatives of the values they proclaimed:

They predicted disaster unless a prescribed course of action was followed, but they left it to crafty and opportunistic politicians to run the world. With few exceptions, the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Religious Phase
• Part II The Philosophy
• Part III The Morenean Methods
• References
• Index