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The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity by J. L. Moreno, M.D.
The Essential Moreno is an important collection of excerpted writings of psychodrama’s legendary founder J. L. Moreno, including basic and advanced concepts and techniques, and verbatim transcripts of psychodrama sessions, edited by Jonathan Fox. The book has been a classic in the psychodrama literature since 1987, with numerous foreign-language editions.
- GenresPsychology
262 pages, Paperback
First published November 15, 1987
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January 31, 2026
"I began to hear voices, not in the sense of a mental patient, but in the sense of a person beginning to feel that he hears a voice which reaches all beings and which speaks to all beings in the same language, which is understood by all men, and one which gives us hope, which gives our life direction, which gives our cosmos a direction and a meaning, that the universe is not just a jungle and a bundle of wild forces, that is basically infinite creativity."
There was a moment that I realized that I was interested, or perhaps already unconsciously enacting, what in the Vienna of the 1920s was beginning to be called psychodrama. I was in a session with a client who, from a young age, locked themselves in the back shed whenever their parents fought. "No one checked in on me" he told me, "no one made sure I was okay, even after everyone else seemed to stop fighting and returned to their normal lives." Many of our sessions had been spent discussing how these evenings in the shed felt for him, and how many nights it would get dark and no one would think to go searching for him. He felt forgotten, that his existence held no impact, no importance in the lives of others. During many of these sessions, I felt like a parent who was sitting with a child who was waiting expectantly for something, worrying about something. If worry is a particular form of hope, then I felt in his eyes a question: "if no one checks in on me, will you?" So began my first moment of accidental drama therapy. By some curious spark of inspiration, I stood from my chair, and gesticulated a knock on an imaginary shed door (simulating the sound of a knock by knocking the wooden table with my other fist). "May I come in and sit with you?" I asked. At these words, it was as if his entire body crumpled. "Yes," he said. And so I sat next to him on the floor for the rest of the session, which took place inside the shed of his childhood.
In discussion with my supervisor, I began to discuss some of these intuitive acting moments, which he identified (using a drama therapy term) as "act hunger." Hunger indeed! I felt starved for more encounters like this. So, in the spirit of renaissance, I went back to the sources. My supervisor lent me this book, a collection of the essential writers of Jacob Moreno, the father of psychodrama. While Moreno studied under Freud in Vienna, he is a very different character in history. Perhaps more like Jung, Moreno was interested in spiritual components to therapy, undergoing a stark religious epiphany as an adolescent and developing what could be called a theology of psychodrama. He believed that humans were not just individual or social, but cosmic, by which he meant that we have a profound need to abide by invisible value systems, and that, like God, we have the ability to perform and create any role we should choose for ourselves, be it animals, imaginary beings, alternative gender identities and sexualities, all as a form of creative participation in the universe. We are all role players, says Moreno, whether we like it or not. Better to cultivate our performance so as not to get caught reciting the same script for eternity.
For me, some of Moreno's language teeters into what my prairie-folk Canadian family might deem woo-woo kumbaya philosophy, and while I sympathize with this judgement, I believe there is a lot to be learned by sitting at the feet of someone like Moreno. As a forerunner for group psychotherapy (alongside others like Carl Rogers) Moreno strayed from the individualistic psychoanalysis of Freud, opting out a dualism that favored the intellect over the body. In fact, psychodrama is a highly embodied practice, and it is in the performance of our double self or our inner child or in the role reversal of my partner and I, that something unconscious can rise to the surface. Unlike in traditional psychoanalysis, the doctor in no longer healer, there is no guru. "One patient can treat another" writes Moreno. It is therapy democratized, placed into the agency of the everyday people, who are given the opportunity through auxiliary actors to realize through action their dreams, their conflicts, their repressions, and their resentments. Unlike Freud's transference, which uses distorted reality to access interpersonal dynamics in a client's person history, Moreno's concept of the tele recognizes a shared reality between two agents who feel a profound sense of reciprocal connectedness.
This collection, edited by Jonathan Fox, has some sections that felt too quantitative for my tastes. There are long studies based off of Moreno's methodology which he called Sociometry (which I will not describe here). What left the most impact on me were the transcriptions of recorded psychodramatic scenarios done in community camps and hospitals, as well as his own personal journal at the end of this anthology where he describes being a young man in Vienna, working amongst the prostitutes and in refugee camps. It is one thing to see an abstract theory applied in practice, but a whole other thing to witness it applied to its creator. This is the beauty of Moreno's work, that it was his life's work, a work that always sprung, spontaneously and creatively, from his deep love of life.
There was a moment that I realized that I was interested, or perhaps already unconsciously enacting, what in the Vienna of the 1920s was beginning to be called psychodrama. I was in a session with a client who, from a young age, locked themselves in the back shed whenever their parents fought. "No one checked in on me" he told me, "no one made sure I was okay, even after everyone else seemed to stop fighting and returned to their normal lives." Many of our sessions had been spent discussing how these evenings in the shed felt for him, and how many nights it would get dark and no one would think to go searching for him. He felt forgotten, that his existence held no impact, no importance in the lives of others. During many of these sessions, I felt like a parent who was sitting with a child who was waiting expectantly for something, worrying about something. If worry is a particular form of hope, then I felt in his eyes a question: "if no one checks in on me, will you?" So began my first moment of accidental drama therapy. By some curious spark of inspiration, I stood from my chair, and gesticulated a knock on an imaginary shed door (simulating the sound of a knock by knocking the wooden table with my other fist). "May I come in and sit with you?" I asked. At these words, it was as if his entire body crumpled. "Yes," he said. And so I sat next to him on the floor for the rest of the session, which took place inside the shed of his childhood.
In discussion with my supervisor, I began to discuss some of these intuitive acting moments, which he identified (using a drama therapy term) as "act hunger." Hunger indeed! I felt starved for more encounters like this. So, in the spirit of renaissance, I went back to the sources. My supervisor lent me this book, a collection of the essential writers of Jacob Moreno, the father of psychodrama. While Moreno studied under Freud in Vienna, he is a very different character in history. Perhaps more like Jung, Moreno was interested in spiritual components to therapy, undergoing a stark religious epiphany as an adolescent and developing what could be called a theology of psychodrama. He believed that humans were not just individual or social, but cosmic, by which he meant that we have a profound need to abide by invisible value systems, and that, like God, we have the ability to perform and create any role we should choose for ourselves, be it animals, imaginary beings, alternative gender identities and sexualities, all as a form of creative participation in the universe. We are all role players, says Moreno, whether we like it or not. Better to cultivate our performance so as not to get caught reciting the same script for eternity.
For me, some of Moreno's language teeters into what my prairie-folk Canadian family might deem woo-woo kumbaya philosophy, and while I sympathize with this judgement, I believe there is a lot to be learned by sitting at the feet of someone like Moreno. As a forerunner for group psychotherapy (alongside others like Carl Rogers) Moreno strayed from the individualistic psychoanalysis of Freud, opting out a dualism that favored the intellect over the body. In fact, psychodrama is a highly embodied practice, and it is in the performance of our double self or our inner child or in the role reversal of my partner and I, that something unconscious can rise to the surface. Unlike in traditional psychoanalysis, the doctor in no longer healer, there is no guru. "One patient can treat another" writes Moreno. It is therapy democratized, placed into the agency of the everyday people, who are given the opportunity through auxiliary actors to realize through action their dreams, their conflicts, their repressions, and their resentments. Unlike Freud's transference, which uses distorted reality to access interpersonal dynamics in a client's person history, Moreno's concept of the tele recognizes a shared reality between two agents who feel a profound sense of reciprocal connectedness.
This collection, edited by Jonathan Fox, has some sections that felt too quantitative for my tastes. There are long studies based off of Moreno's methodology which he called Sociometry (which I will not describe here). What left the most impact on me were the transcriptions of recorded psychodramatic scenarios done in community camps and hospitals, as well as his own personal journal at the end of this anthology where he describes being a young man in Vienna, working amongst the prostitutes and in refugee camps. It is one thing to see an abstract theory applied in practice, but a whole other thing to witness it applied to its creator. This is the beauty of Moreno's work, that it was his life's work, a work that always sprung, spontaneously and creatively, from his deep love of life.
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