What is Dramathepary

Dramatherapy is a therapeutic - transformational process which operates at various levels:

1. the individual level
2. the social/ collective level
3. spiritual/ philosophical level

It approaches the human being as a whole: Body – Soul – Spirit.

Dramatherapy is an integrated psychotherapeutic approach. As a psychotherapeutic process it provides a unique manner of employing the human’s ability to create dramatic representations, in order to either explore his/her needs (diagnosis) or to enable corrective experience (therapy); both of which can then make up the demand for therapeutic change.

Sue Jennings, the principal inspiration behind Dramatherapy in Europe, reframes at the therapeutic level man’s dramatic ability, what she calls the developmental model of drama, in other words the three stages of development: embodiment – projection – role (ERP). In her last book “Ariadne’s ball of thread” (1998) she maintains that it in fact starts at the moment of conception, inside the uterus, to reach completion at about the age of 7. According to Jennings, since the embodiment – projection – role model is a distinct and clear developmental process in life itself, we can use it as a model for applied Dramatherapy.

In other words we are speaking of the basic principle of a therapeutic approach through drama which can exist as an independent method able to provide therapeutic treatment in response to the customer's request for short of long-term therapeutic work.

Dramatherapy can be applied at both the individual and group levels and it comes under the category of Arts therapies.

In this case, the art of theatre, either as a complete action with a specific aesthetic purpose or as the genetic code of the dramatherapeutic process, seeks to find ways to make use of the transitional space that can contain the paradox of the dramatic action. Thus, internal and external reality come to meet in this transitional space (Winnicott, 1971).

The paradox of the dramatic action is achieved through dramatic metaphor (Jennings, 1990), which in dramatherapy is expressed through creativity and the multiple aesthetic forms of human expression. Metaphor is a necessary condition for artistic creation and for every therapeutic process since it helps remove psychological blocks and activates the mechanism of sublimation.