Nolte's Thoughts on Psychodrama

[Connie Miller]

Thank you Ed for the kind words..it is nice to remember Clare and her wishes and vision just a year after her death. Blessings Connie 
-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Schreiber [mailto:edwschreiber at earthlink.net]
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 05:41 PM
To: 'Adam Blatner'
Cc: list at grouptalkweb.org
Subject: Re: Nolte's Thoughts on Psychodrama

Hi John, 

I recall fondly many years of conversations I had with Clare Danielson about Boughton Place about her vision of psychodrama (aka Morenean methods) for community, for education. And there are many among us who have brought (like Connie and Natalie for example) the method to the light of a spiritual practice. That's how I see it I guess given my preference for Moreno's philosophy which as an expression of an existential understanding of human, group and social transformation. This, in my view, goes beyond therapy. That said, I honor the amazingly skilled work of our colleagues who use this work for healing within the therapy genre. My time over New Years was with Zerka. I was helping her to prepare her memoirs for publication, which by the way is in the works of happening. These are the stories all of us would benefit from.


During that time she so often expressed gratitude for the colleagues around the world who are bringing the method to the world in as many ways as we are able. Most know my feelings about society and it's transition to something we have not known ever - and there is no doubt in my mind and my research that the most essential tools for this transition and transformation are Morenean.


Thank you Jim for leading!


Best,


Ed
On Feb 15, 2008, at 2:47 PM, Adam Blatner wrote:

To Grouptalk: 
 John Nolte, a trainer of psychodrama who has also been involved in bringing psychodrama to the legal profession, wrote the following on the ASGPP website forum. He gave me permission to send this out for your interest. Part 1 addresses the scope of the field, and in a few ways I agree with him, especially about re-visioning psychodrama as a broader field that involves communications in general rather than just therapy. In some ways---re the politics of how to deal with certification, etc.--- I haven't taken any position. (My skill of political negotiations is not well-developed.) Still, I think that he raises is worthy of wider dissemination and discussion. Warmly, Adam
 - - - - - 
>From John Nolte: Diatribe (2/12/08): 
 As long as psychodramatic practice is limited to the mental health field, it is likely to have little effect upon society at large. There simply aren’t that many mental health patients who will be exposed to the method. There is a multitude of situations in our society in which psychodrama and sociometry could prove exceedingly useful if they were more widely known. Only when psychodrama is utilized in many of its functions other than psychotherapy can we expect it to play a significant role in society.
Although much lip service is paid to the importance of non-clinical applications of psychodrama within the psychodrama collective and its organizational expression, the American Society for Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy, little else, with very few refreshing exceptions, is done to encourage or support those functions and applications of psychodrama which lie outside the mental health domain.
Although early volumes of the journal, Group Psychotherapy, were replete with articles on and describing non-clinical applications of psychodrama, few such articles are published in the journal today. A large majority of the presentations at annual conferences are concerned with the therapeutic function of psychodrama, often attempting to marry psychodrama with one of a variety of other methods.1 It does not help that psychodrama is usually defined as a method of psychotherapy or of group psychotherapy.
We can find a number of reasons why this is so beginning with the fact that J. L. Moreno was a psychiatrist who developed psychodrama in his private sanitarium, initially known as Beacon Hill, using what he had learned from his Stegreiftheatre of the early 1920's. That the first students of psychodrama were mostly from the mental health and counseling professions was only natural. 
An irony is that psychodrama has historically been relegated to the fringes of mental health practice. Today, while recognizing the non-clinical uses for psychodrama, and generally supportive of them, most of the members of the psychodrama collective use the therapeutic function of psychodrama only in a clinical setting. Most importantly is the fact that psychodrama is generally and widely defined as a method of psychotherapy or group psychotherapy and the only process for certification in psychodrama underscores this definition. Although the American Board of Examiners in Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy allows for certification by individuals who do not possess the credentials to practice psychotherapy, anyone without a masters degree in one of the mental health or counseling professions is required to complete course work at the graduate level in the core curriculum of those professions from which psychotherapists come! The message is clear. One must have the education of a psychotherapist to achieve official sanction to practice psychodrama.
It is time, perhaps long past time to make some changes. Let’s begin by considering psychodrama, not as a method of psychotherapy, but as a method of communication. It is not only a method of interpersonal communication but also of self-communication. By this I mean that psychodrama can be regarded as an extended or expanded form of self-reflection in which one subjectively examines one’s experiences, ponders the meanings of experiences, explores how and why they happened, and in general tries to make sense out of the apparent nonsense or mysteries of life. By externalizing and giving objective existence to the subjective, psychodrama greatly facilitates this process.
Therefore I propose that we re-adopt Moreno’s definition of psychodrama as "the science of exploring the truth through dramatic action," and look at it as a method of communication which has a number of functions, one of which is psychotherapy.
The American Board of Examiners in Psychodrama, Sociometry and Group Psychotherapy has been in existence for over 32 years. From the time that the Board gave its first examination, the only changes the Board has made in its ways of doing business have been to increase bureaucracy, paperwork and redundancy. I have yet to meet a trainer or an applicant who has not reported being greatly put off (or perhaps put upon) by the certification process. The Board has sometimes had difficulty in finding people willing to serve upon it. Is it possible that some sort of change is long overdue?
What follows is a suggestion for a radical revision of the psychodrama certification process.
- Requirements for certification; - Education; - Current requirement is "a masters degree from an accredited university..."
Proposed: There is probably no need for a formal education requirement for certification in psychodrama. I have trained a number of people who haven’t had a college degree, some of whom are quite competent at directing psychodrama, and some of whom later achieved a masters degree2 and have become certified. Jonathon Moreno was a good director at age 11, and served on the staff of the Moreno Institute when he was 17 or 18 years old.
I suspect that the masters degree was originally established because the originators of the certification process had in mind certification for psychotherapists and counselors. Here a masters degree makes sense but is unnecessary because state laws regulate who can and cannot practice psychotherapy or counseling. The Board of Examiners doesn’t have to worry about it. Eliminating the education requirement would open the certification process to people like substance abuse counselors who have "come up through the rank," who have learned by having successfully gone through substance abuse programs. It would also make eligible teachers and others in non-clinical fields.
- Post-graduate education for applicants without degrees in clinical fields.
Having read the above you can guess that I am for eliminating this requirement. For the past dozen years I have trained a fairly large number of lawyers in the psychodramatic method. They seem to learn much faster than the many people in the mental health fields whom I have also trained. I am reluctant to say that they learn faster because they haven’t been trained in one of the conventional mental health fields but I believe that a case could be made that in our traditional training we are taught to be overly cautious and we carry that fear into our psychodrama training. A few of those lawyers have trained with other TEP’s who verify that they have attained a high level of competence–without the coursework required for certification.
- Training: Current requirements–780 hours of training.
Hours has always seemed to be to be a lousy way to measure training in psychodrama. Using hours makes several questionable assumptions: 
- One hour is the equivalent of every other hour. Comment: Everyone who has been trained or who has trained knows that there are moments of great learning and moments of boredom in the course of training.
- All trainees start at the same place. Comment: Some trainees have a natural talent for learning the psychodramatic method. A few will never ever make it.
- Seven hundred eighty hours is a magic number. Comment: Some people in training display considerable competence well before they have accomplished 780 hours of training; others require far more to reach the level commensurate with being certified.
(I have always been dismayed when I hear people in training comparing hours or making decisions based on the number of hours they may gain by attending this or that program. By setting such standards the Board encourages the accumulation of hours when the trainee should be concerned with becoming more competent. That being said, I do not have any suggestions for replacing this standard with a better one. I hope someone, somewhere does have.)
Professional practice
It is in this section of the requirements for certification that the Board makes it clear that it is only considering the clinical psychodramatist as an applicant for certification. As a matter of fact, one of the first executive directors of the Board consistently referred to the C.P. as "Clinical Practitioner," despite numerous corrections by one of the Board Directors.3 
The rules for supervised experience also demonstrate the arbitrary rigidity that the Board has developed over the years.
The supervised experience requirement calls for the trainee to conduct 80 sessions of psychodrama over a 52 week (approximately one year) period, under supervision.
One of my trainees had conducted 80 sessions under my supervision in approximately 9 months. 
When we submitted the supervised experience form, which called for beginning and end dates for the supervised experience, it was rejected because the dates comprised less than a year. We had to re-submit the form after changing the ending date to match the beginning date plus one year. That strikes me as the ultimate in bureaucratic idiocy for which there should be no place in the spontaneity methods.
While I think it is fine to define the supervised experience as a number of sessions, setting a minimum time period in which they are to be accomplished strikes me as unnecessary if not ridiculous.
Supervision: The rule calls for 40 supervision sessions of at least 50 minutes each to cover the 80 sessions of experience.
The stupidity here is again measuring an existential entity by clock hours. Because I have frequently been in the position of supervising students at a distance which precludes frequent vis a vis supervision, I have had to supervise via telephone. The most important supervision–i.e., when the student gains the most value–has been calls, often with high anxiety immediately after a session in which the trainee has an important question about something he/she has just done in the session and about which the student has a serious question. The ten or fifteen minutes in discussing the student’s intervention and the reasons why it was appropriate or inappropriate, perhaps what the student needs to do, are far more valuable than 50 minutes of listening to a student tediously describe the whole session. The Board absolutely needs to allow and trust the trainer to supervise in the trainer’s own style. Inadequate supervised experience will show up in the onsite examination.
Professional activities–although desirable, this requirement is too vague and imprecise to be of any value. It serves simply to arouse anxiety in the applicant.
Endorsements of competency: My quarrel here is largely with the paperwork. To begin with the endorsement forms require both applicant and endorser to enter the names of both applicant and endorser on the same sheet of paper. Redundant? I think so.
Next, the form requires the trainer to submit some narrative description of the applicant. One thing called for is strengths and weaknesses. Another calls for "anecdotal" descriptions of the applicant. These are not only unnecessary and ridiculous requirements but totally useless. No trainer is going to mention a fatal flaw in the trainees performance in an endorsement for certification, and anecdotal descriptions could well violate confidentiality. The Board cannot utilize any such subjective material in determining whether or not the student should be admitted to the examination--without running a great risk of defending itself legally.
There are only three things that the Board needs from the primary trainer and only those three can be used to admit the applicant to the examination process. They are:
1. The trainer is convinced that the applicant has reached a level of competence which is commensurate with that of a certified practitioner.
2. Verification of the applicant’s training experience.
3. Verification of supervised experience.
Once the trainer submits those three statements, the Board must admit the student to the examination. No other information is relevant, pertinent, or operational.
Examination
Here is where the radical revision truly begins. The Board currently requires a written examination covering seven areas.
The first and least radical suggestion is to drop the areas of research and related fields. Neither are pertinent to the practice of psychodrama. The vast majority of practicing psychodramatists, clinical or non-clinical, do not come from a research oriented discipline. While the field of psychodrama could well use a vast number of decent research studies, the practitioners are not the ones who are likely to do it. Besides, certification is for practitioners, not researchers.
Likewise, it makes no sense to require that applicants for certification be versant in so-called "related fields." This has meant related methods of psychotherapy. The Board is certifying psychodramatists, not gestalt therapists, or transactional analysts. We should be examining only on the relevant method.
Now here is where my suggestions get really radical. So hang on to your seat until we get through this. First a disclaimer. The following is a seed of an idea. There are significant problems with it (although probably no more than with the present procedure.)
Scrap the written test. Do away with it. No more anxious nights rummaging through all the previous tests, wondering "will they ask THAT one again?" No more making copies of each section for each test taker, sending them out to readers to read. No more reading a couple dozen offerings of history of psychodrama. Do away with it.
Next we borrow a page from the speciality examinations of other professions:
The Board appoints several examining committees composed of perhaps three TEP’s. Each committee meets at a specific time and location, the location a place central to a number of applicants.
A group is recruited. How is one of the issues that need to be worked out. One possibility is to conduct some examinations in conjunction with the annual meeting. Some years ago the annual conference featured the "perpetual theatre of psychodrama," in which a number of directors in succession ran sessions throughout the day. It was often well-attended and something similar could be organized for the purposes of examination.
The applicant runs a psychodrama session attended by the examining committee.
The committee meets with the applicant to process and discuss the session that the applicant has just directed.
The committee conducts an oral examination in place of the written one.
The advantages:
- This process is far more slicker and quicker than the one in place in which applicants wait months to learn the outcome of the written examination.
- Examinations can be conducted several times a year instead of once.
- The interaction between committee and applicant will yield a much greater and more accurate assessment of the applicants sophistication regarding the Morenean methods than any written examination.
- The committee should have the trust of the Board sufficient to inform the applicant on the spot or within a day or two if the applicant has been successful.
- With careful organization, this may be a less expensive process than the current one.
I am sending this to all the participants of the pre-conference workshop on non-clinical psychodrama. I would really appreciate responses. Tell me if you think it is a whacked-out idea if that is what you really think. Make suggestions for how to improve the basic idea. Or take a swing at your ideas on how to make a more user-friendly certification process.
Isn’t it time to re-vamp the current mess and make it more accessible to non-clinical psychodramatists? -- John Nolte

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