Gestures and Relations

In a psychodrama group session the director will often say to the protagonist in the drama: Go ahead. Set out this place in time. Use people, use chairs, use props. The protagonist will begin to concretize a moment from their past. As the scene is created, the director will ask the protagonist to describe what is before them. The group is witness to a remembered moment being formed anew, a transient structure in which the group members may be invited to become people or animals or windows or trees.

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Photographs of psychodrama are a novel type of memoir, recording depictions of family systems, but with the group taking up the roles of family members. In The Familial Gaze Nancy Miller speculates that family photographs serve to structure memories and relations:

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“By taking the picture, parents consciously and unconsciously rehearse the drama of related identities. In a way the photo is the relation.”1

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An audience who views these photographs of psychodrama won’t know whether the scenes portray places and moments in the protagonists’ lives, or whether they represent a surplus reality that has been explored in the psychodrama. Nevertheless, the concretisation of props and people produces a mapping of relationship. This map may represent what cannot be fully expressed, perhaps the beginnings of a new understanding emerging in the protagonist, of their family system and the social forces and intergenerational forces that press upon it.

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Yvonne Shaw

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1. Nancy Miller, “Putting Ourselves in the Picture: Memoirs and Mourning,” in The Familial Gaze, edited by Marianne Hirsch, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 51-66.