PSYCHIATRIC AND CULTURAL ASPECTS OF THE OPPOSITION TO PSYCHODRAMA

Abstract

It was Casanova who said that people who had read only one book were extremely dangerous. What he meant, of course, was that those who had had their schooling at only one single institution were bound to put up a stiff opposition to ideas that differed from those they held. A drastic example for this are the advocates of pharmacological monism in psychiatry on the one hand and the inflexible adherents of this or that psychotherapeutical sect on the other. Once upon a time they, too, had been fighting for the establishment of a new idea, but once their idea had become accepted they turned orthodox. The phenomenon is too well known to make it worth while writing an entire article about it; yet an analysis of the opposition put up to psychodrama reveals more than mere mental inertia and pusillanimous rejection of what is new and strange. Opposition to psychodrama not only reflects the direction
taken by conventional psychiatry and by clinical psychology, it points to distinctive tendencies in the development of our culture.