VISION FOR THE FUTURE OF PSYCHODRAMA.

messages from worldwide psychodramatists

Anne Ancelin Schutzenberger

Writing from my high mountain home in the French Alpes while
resting for two months with my family.

Dear fellow psychodramatists,

The turn of the century is somewhat strange for me and for the world,
and for psychodrama. I am just back from the Vienna World Council for
Psychotherapy where I was a key-note speaker on transgenerational links.
I also organized a round-table about various trends in psychodrama, with
Paul Holmes (UK), Max Clayton (NZ), Sue Daniel (Au), Maurizio Gasseau
(It), and Ulf Klein (De). There, I met again Lew Yablonski, an old fellow
of the dozen of the first directors of the Moreno Institute in Beacon (NY)
during the fifties and sixties. We are, it seems, only a few still living
and working with psychodrama: Zerka Moreno, Lew Yablonski, and myself.
Gretl Leutz was trained and became a "Director" a little later.

I feel actually a little as i felt when J.L. Moreno somehow "forced" me
to organize the First International Congress of Psychodrama in Paris in
1964. We did not know then how difficult or successful it could be, but
hoped. It became a great success, with more than 1300 participants from 32
countries. I organized it practically single-handed from my kitchen
with some students of mine and the international help of Zerka, of course.

Now, psychodrama and roleplaying has become so well-known, used almost
everywhere. Often without mentioning its origin, it is commonly used in
various forms of psychotherapy and training.

At 80, I am still very active. I teach social and clinical psychology,
non-verbal communication and transgenerational links as Professor Emeritus
at my French Nice University in the South of France. Furthermore, I also
teach psychodrama at "P'Somatics" in the South of France & in Paris, in
Scandinavia (Uppsala Psychodrama Center) and in September in the Oslo
Psychodrama Institute, and in Canada. I apply psychodrama for people with
the anniversary syndrome, with cancer and AIDS, and for training the
helpers of AIDS patients, giving them supervision in Switzerland for some
10 years. 

As you may know, I have written some dozen books on sociometry,
roleplaying, psychodrama, non verbal communication (most of them translated
into many languages) and recently, "The Ancestor Syndrome" - a best seller
book that was translated into English and published by Routledge in 1998,
as well as
into Portuguese and Russian (in preparation).

My program for the next year is full, with conferences and psychodrama
training seminars. Though I try to work and travel less, I am having a
wonderful active time and I love every second of it.

For the future, I hope that psychodrama will be well taught and properly
learned by all students in human relations, psychology and medicine, by
nurses and doctors, teachers and group leaders. And I hope that the various
schools of group-work, group-psychotherapy and psychodrama will get
closer to one another.

Psychodrama is for me an emcompassing wonderful technique and tool,
as well as a way of life. I am proud to belong to the creative family
of psychodramatists who tries to make this world a little happier and
and a little more pleasant to live in for our children.

Hope to see you all in Jerusalem next year.

Best of best!

anne