Career
While living in Vienna in the early 1900s Moreno started an improvisational theater company, Stegreiftheater, the Theater of Spontaneity where he formulated a form of psychotherapy he called psychodrama, which employed improvised dramatizations, role-plays and other therapeutic, spontaneous dramatic expressions that utilized and unleashed the spontaneity and creativity of the group and its individual members. Moreno saw "psychodrama as the next logical step beyond psychoanalysis." It was "an opportunity to get into action instead of just talking, to take the role of the important people in our lives to understand them better, to confront them imaginatively in the safety of the therapeutic theater, and most of all to become more creative and spontaneous human beings."
In his book Who Shall Survive? (Preludes, p.xxviii) Moreno wrote of the genesis of his Group Psychotherapy in 1913–14 in Vienna, formulating his ideas while working with groups of prostitutes.
Moving to the US in 1925, he began working in New York City. There, Moreno worked on his theory of interpersonal relations, and the development of his work in psychodrama, sociometry, group psychotherapy, sociodrama, and sociatry. In his autobiography he wrote "only in New York, the melting pot of the nations, the vast metropolis, with all its freedom from all preconceived notions, could I be free to pursue sociometric group research in the grand style I had envisioned".
The New York Times wrote "He found that acceptance of his theories was slow, particularly because some colleagues deplored his showmanship."
He worked at the Plymouth Institute, Brooklyn, and at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1929, he founded an Impromptu Theater at Carnegie Hall and later did work at the Guild Theater. He made studies of sociometry at Sing Sing Prison in 1931.
In 1932, Moreno first introduced group psychotherapy to the American Psychiatric Association, and co-authored the monograph Group Method and Group Pschotherapy with Helen Hall Jennings. He and Jennings were the first to use a stochastic network model (or, "chance sociogram", as they called it), predating the Erdős–Rényi model and the network model of Anatol Rapoport.
In 1936, he founded the Beacon Hill Sanitarium, and the adjacent Therapeutic Theater.
In 1937–1938, he taught a university seminar on psychodrama ("Introduction to Psychodrama") at Columbia University under the auspices of the Guidance Laboratory, Teachers College. He later taught a seminar "On Sociometry" with and by invitation of Dr. Alvin Saunders Johnson at the New School for Social Research.
For the next 40 years he developed and introduced his Theory of Interpersonal Relations and tools for social sciences he called 'sociodrama', 'psychodrama', 'sociometry', and 'sociatry'. In his monograph entitled, "The Future of Man's World", he describes how he developed these sciences to counteract "the economic materialism of Marx, the psychological materialism of Freud, and the technological materialism" of our modern industrial age. In 1954, he was a founding member of the International Committee on Group Psychotherapy, which later transformed into the International Association of Group Psychotherapy.
His autobiography describes his position as "threefold:
Spontaneity and creativity are the propelling forces in human progress, beyond and independent of libido and socioeconomic motives [that] are frequently interwoven with spontaneity-creativity, but [this proposition] does deny that spontaneity and creativity are merely a function and derivative of libido or socioeconomic motives.
Love and mutual sharing are powerful, indispensable working principles in group life. Therefore, it is imperative that we have faith in our fellow man's intentions, a faith which transcends mere obedience arising from physical or legalistic coercion.
That a super dynamic community based on these principles can be brought to realization through new techniques..."
Moreno died at home in Beacon, N.Y., in 1974, aged 84. He chose to die by abstaining from all food and water after a long illness. His ashes are buried at Feuerhalle Simmering in Vienna. His epitaph, at his request, reads "DER MANN, DER FREUDE UND LACHEN IN DIE PSYCHIATRIE BRACHTE" (The man who brought joy and laughter to psychiatry).
