İnci Doğaner
5th Romanian National Conference of Psychodrama: Power and Ethics, 9- 11
November 2012 and
FEPTO ANNUAL MEETING, 2017
ETHICS OF PSYCHODRAMA
MORALITY VERSUS MORAL PHILOSOPHY
ethics is accepted as
Study of morality, moral philosophy
 The standards of moral conduct of a specific
professional group (Moreno J 1994)

distinction of morality from moral philosophy
Specific to human is “action”, a voluntary
behavior that arises from a principle, norm,
belief or value
 Homo moralis (good, right regarding a care to
others)
 Morality is a group of beliefs, values, norms,
taboos, restrictions, propositions that guides
 Individuals, Group of people, a class, a nation
 A certain period of time (Özlem D, 2010)

first ethician: Aristotle : Nikomakhean ethics :
Platon 422- 347 BC and Aristotle 384- 322 BC
Raphael 1510

Bringing systematics:
Grounding, classifying,
evaluating, evaluating,
comparing

Three questions: What
should I choose? What
should I do? What
should I want?
Does psychodrama has a moral philosophy?
FOUNDATION OF PSYCHODRAMA
William Sheakespeare (1564- 1616):
Jacques and Hamlet (he choses a double for himself from the players)
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All the world is a stage. And
all men and women merely
players. They have their
exists and enterances. And
one man in his time plays
many roles ” (As you like it,
Act II, S VII, 1599) ,
“...suit the action to the
word, the word to the
action...for anything so
overdone is from the
purpose of playing...was
and is, to hold is it were,
the mirror up to the nature,
to show virtue her own
feature, scorn her own
Moreno: beliefs and philosophy (he build a system for treatment;
that is a philosophy of life)
Role theory, role reversal, role playing, encounter,
I-God, I-Thou, spontaneity, creativity, co-creation,
cultural conserve, axiodrama, sociometry, tele,
social atom, cultural atom, pd, sd, surplus reality,
co-unconscious
 A truely therapeutic procedure cannot have an
objective less than the whole mankind”
 My philosophy has been
misunderstood...techniques created to implement
an underlying philosophy of life has been almost
universally accepted while the underlying
philosophy has been relegated to the dark corners
of library shelves or entirely pushed aside.
(Moreno JL1934)

ETHICS OF PSCHOANALYSIS BY
JACQUES LACAN (1901- 1981)
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Her desire to bury
her brother is
something is not just
a simple event.
Lacan catches the
creative moment of
Antigone as the
scene she burries
her brother’s dead
body late at night.
This represents the
splender of
Antigone. This is
where beauty and
ethics arise.
his protagonist: Antigone of Sophocles 441 b.c.
Marie Stillman 1844-1927
antigone
“and at the very moment when everybody tries
to escape to cover their heads with their arms
and go to earth at the spectacle of the change
in nature, little Antigone appears at the height
of the total darkness of the cataclysmic
moment. She appears more beside the corpse,
emitting moans like abird that has just lost it’s
young”
 She will be placed alive in a tomb.
 According to Lacan the ethics of pscyhoanalysis

THE PROTAGONIST OF MORENO
A change in paradigm: patient versus
protagonist (here, who undergoes the test)
 A psychodramatic role coming into life
 From arts to daily life
 From isolation to social life
 Who shall survive?: the weak will also

Moreno, continued
“Virtue” to be reached in practice: more
aristotalien then platonistic
 Spontaneity and creativity is a virtue to be reached
 It is a quality of God. The world becomes our world,
the world of our choice, the world of our creation
 Biological, social, scientific, politic, theologic
 Universal goods and beauties
 In practice he is consequentialistic
 But relativistic and axiologic in practice

Protagoras 481- 420 BC
Henri Matisse (1869- 1954) Dance 1909

Man is the measure of all
things.
Nicolai Hartmann (1882- 1950)
Alberto Giocometti (1901- 1966)
Alfred Jules Ayer (1910- 1989)
Orhan Taylan (1941-) 2012
meta- ethics: by loving, hating, choosing we have our values. Ethical
sentences do not express propositions but emotions.
Ayşe, 2009
A PSYCHODRAMA PROTAGONIST
Jean Paul Sartre ( 1905- 1980)
Alberto Giocometti (1901- 1966)
Jacob Levi Moreno ( 1889- 1974)
Orhan Taylan (transformation)
hell or heaven: Hell is the others / We are co-lovers- cocreators
the egelitarian choice
Cathegorical classification of psychiatric
disorders (kind) : Major Depression
 Dimentional classification (extend):
dependency, obsessiveness
 Seaking for less pain, peace, harmony, hidden
revenge, fair fight or whatever...
 Majority unless an unanimous choice

about Ayşe’s psychodrama
The therapist as the king, the wise man and the
fool
 The protagonist as the king, the wise man and
the fool
 “Obey your father” is a cultural conserve and
re-created by Ayşe: “A loving family”

encounter is the cornerstone of the moral
philosophy of psychodrama
First step: Here and now encounter of
psychodramatist and protagonist
 Second step: Protagonist encounters the
representatives of the others from her social
atom and of herself (double)
 Third step: Protagonist encounters the group in
the here and now the group
 Forth step: Encounters with real social atom
people after the session

psychodramatist is a participant researcher
Peter Howie, 2012
Psychodramatist immediately becomes outside
of the positivistic emprisistic tradition (Peter
Howie, 2012)
 Power issue may be less problematic when
researchers join the community rather than
enter as experts (Crigger, Holcomb and Weiss
2001)

more on encounter
Orhan Taylan, Jacob Levi Moreno

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“It means a contact of
bodies, confrontation,
countering and battling,
seeing and perceiving,
touching and entering into
each other, sharing and
loving, communicating with
each other in a primary,
intuitive manner, by speech
or gesture, by kiss and
embrace, but also hostile
and threateiing
relationships...
No “external authority...in
more on encounter
Jacob Levi Moreno, Orhan Taylan

And when you are near/
I will tear your eyes out/
and place then instead
of mine/ and you will
tear my eyes out/ and
place instead of yours/
Then I will look at you
with your eyes .../ and
you will look at me with
mine
Martin Buber (1878- 1965): I and You
Buonarotti Michelangelo 1475- 1564)
The mode of experince versus
the mode of encounter
 I-You versus I- It is a loving, a
responsibility; sees all space
and time; it cannot be reduce to
the qualities of language, time,
space.
 I of it is ego; I of You is person.
 It involses both choosing and
being chosen
 Human beings, nature and God
 A feeling of competence
 When we say You to God he
encounter from other philosophers responds by transforming us.
 He proves its eaning in Action

“The principle is clear, on the
level of creativity. We do not

identify Sheakespeare with

Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Juliet
or Cordelia. If this is true in
the relationship between
dramatist and one of his
characters how much more
pertinent must it be for the
relationship between man
and God .” (Moreno JL, The
Words of the Father, 1923,
Moreno (1889- 1974), Hallac-ı Mansur
(858- 922)
2011)

Moreno’s I-God
En-el Hakk (I am God)
A Nietzschen irony (Moreno J)

Friedrich Nietzsche 1844- 1900
Orhan Taylan (1941-)
God is dead
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“God is dead”
Overman/ spontaneous man
Body versus rationality
They open the gate of the
irrational part , the psyche
I –God is a possible
connection for all of us since
we all had an omnipotent
mother in us
Emmanuel Levinas (1906- 1995): face to face
Cindy Sherman (1954-)
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encounter from other philosophers
Meaning of being resides in his
ethical responsibility
Ethics is the first philosophy
Philosophy is the wisdom of
love
In face to face relation the
Other’s proximity and distance
both are strongly felt
The revelation of face makes a
demand: Thou shall not kill me.
The relation is not symetric: the
face gives itself proximity.
God is the Infinite Other.
TRADITIONS WITH SIMILARITY TO
PSYCHODRAMA
Hermeneutic/ intepretive philosophy
 Phenemenology
 Existantialism
 Social constructivism
 Postmodernism
