Psychodrama and IFS Multiplicity
David Williams 

One of the pioneers of multiplicity was Jacob Moreno. As you can read, he was a peer of Freud, and his ground-breaking ideas and methods preceded Gestalt, Ken Wilbur and most of the other modalities of interest to the Co-Constructions project.
Moreno literally created a Therapeutic Stage in Beacon Hill, New York, for people to walk in off the street and enact what he called “roles” – both interpersonal and intra-personal, aka parts. Much like Dick Schwartz created IFS as a complete model, Moreno created a whole modality called, “Psychodrama.”
Moreno was a deeply spiritual man who saw the universe, independent of religions, as being imbued with a spontaneity and creativity that all beings were capable of accessing. A key figure in the New Zealand and Australian Psychodrama community, the Psychodrama Trainer Max Clayton (now deceased), wrote numerous books where he talked about the “life force” in a client’s system, something akin to the IFS concept of Self energy and its quality of Creativity. A key aim of Psychodrama is to develop peoples’ creative spontaneity by enabling participants to enact the different roles within and between group members.

Psychodrama is also an experiential modality. Moreno conceived of “roles” as each having their own thoughts, feeling, sensations and actions. In a psychodrama, participants enact certain roles and thereby experience all dimensions of a role wholistically. Moreno’s inclusion of the body was groundbreaking in the 1930’s, and echoes the development of IFS to include the somatic (which we understand is thanks largely to Dick Schwartz being open to Susan McDonnell’s somatic insights).
Moreno also thought systemically about the relationship between enacted roles. A sub-branch of Psychodrama, called “Sociodrama” focusses on “laying out the system” which basically involves having people enact the different outer and inner roles/parts, and experiencing how they interact. The Psychodramatic technique of placing a “protagonist”/client in the “mirror position” outside their system and enabling the client to observe their whole system interacting closely resembles the IFS process of “unblending.” Indeed, whenever a protagonist/client enacts a role/part and is then invited to pick a group member to enact that role, they are physically (and often emotionally) unblending from the role/part.

Moreover, Moreno invented an extensive array of externalization techniques like empty chair and sculpting, which many therapists believe were created by Fritz Perl and others. For example, in Psychodrama they have a technique called, “Interviewing for Role,” which is almost exactly the same as direct access in IFS. The only difference is in Psychodrama, when you say to a client, say, “So you’re the Part that criticises Alex?,” in Psychodrama, you are saying these same words to an actual group member who is enacting the client’s Critic Part.
Indeed, one of the Psychodramatic techniques that (in my opinion) could be used more in IFS is called, ‘Maximization.’ This is where you invite the client to “make that bigger” as you refer to one of the client’s non-verbal behaviours. Done with enough Self energy, maximizing raises the client’s awareness of the sensations they would otherwise be unaware of. For example, say you notice the client picking at their own fingernails, a Psychodrama Director might say, “Make that bigger!” As the client is exaggerating their nail picking, the Psychodrama Director might then say, “And put words to that?” And out of the client’s mouth comes the sensations, feeling and thoughts that accompany this otherwise subtle behaviour associated with a Part. In other words, maximization is another way of “fleshing out” a Part.

With all that Psychodrama has to offer, you might be wondering how come Psychodrama didn’t take off to be a more widely known and practiced form of therapy?
The unfortunate corollary to Moreno’s emphasis on spontaneity was that it lacked a framework for practitioners to more easily (at least in my experience) master the art of “directing” a client’s psychodrama. Without a coherent framework, trainee Psychodrama Directors are often left wondering where to go next, in what feels like a theoretical vacuum. By contrast, I found IFS provided an open framework that guided my facilitation of an IFS session – be it one-on-one, or with a group. But probably, more importantly, the idea of systematically collecting data on the effectiveness of Psychodrama was anathema to the core principle of fostering spontaneity. So, for a modality that has been around since the 1930’s, Psychodrama to this day has a sparse evidence base.

In conclusion, Jacob Moreno and Psychodrama was one of the great pioneers of multiplicity. From the 1930’s he conceptualized people as comprised of multiple outer and inner roles, aka Parts. He saw those roles as interacting as a system. What is more, he created an impressive array of methods to externalize people’s multiple inner roles/Parts that other modalities have built on and enhanced since.

Dave Williams is a retired Psychologist who lives in Sydney, Australia. Prior to becoming a L2 Certified IFS Therapist, Dave spent five years training in Psychodrama. This essay was originally published October 2023 in PARTS & SELF, an online, multimedia, open access magazine, published by the Foundation for Self Leadership. 

Original artwork by Susan Aaron.