I just bought & downloaded “The Concordance” as my friend Simon calls it.
THE WORDS OF JACOB LEVY MORENO:
Vocabulary of Quotations from Psychodrama,
Group Psychotherapy, Sociodrama and Sociometry
ROSA CUKIER
It is an index to some of Moreno’s main writing, handy!
It is often translated from the Portuguese or Spanish etc. Hence we get some interesting words.
This is the first passage quoted:
ABREACTION
… A variety of improvisation is often called “abreaction.”
Whereas improvisation has an esthetic aim and is characterized
by some degree of freedom, abreaction has no conscious esthetic
aim, it is unfroze and compulsory. Both have a low degree of
mental organization.
Theatre of Spontaneity p. 79
El Teatro de la Espontaneidad p. 141
Teatro da Espontaneidade p. 96
“unfroze and compulsory”, I love that.
I wonder what the original was, was that in German?
I imagine the idea is one that I think of as central to the psyche.
What emerges in states of spontaneity, a state of freedom, comes unbidden, autonomously from the self, from beyond the ego. Jung calls this the autonomous psyche. Feelings are like this, but whole ways of being, roles can emerge as well.
“How are you?”
There is no choice, you are who you are right now, in this moment… compulsory. Yet there is choice as to how to express that, how to be with that, how to transform that, unfroze.