engleski

The black hole metaphor and its meaning in psychodrama work - a case study

This work presents an example of psychodrama therapy applied to a Cathy, middle-aged woman with depressive symptomatology, who was also a breast cancer patient at the Rebro Clinic. The group consisted of 20 women with unipolar depression. The group was meeting twice a week. A psychodrama session lasted 180 minutes. It was a closed-type group. Under favourable psychotherapeutic circumstances the protagonist is allowed to indulge in fantasies which are normally scary to him or her. The specificity of this psychodrama session lay in the use of a highly powerful psychotherapeutic tool: the metaphor. In Cathy’s psychodrama the black hole is shown as a metaphor of the sense of emptiness, lifelessness, abandonment and possible death. Studying the theme of death is one of primary development points in the group, because thinking about it means accepting the category of time, especially if death is understood dynamically ; it then becomes equal to life, rebirth, future time marked by the taste of finality. This can also be understood as a progress in the group’s development, because by verbalising the theme of the fear of death and enacting it the group members in a way become the “masters” of both death and life. For Cathy it was crucial to confront the life-threatening dimension of experience and, on the other hand, arrive at a feeling that such experience is overcome. This other aspect gave rise to a cathartic response that helped the group members to accept and/or affirm a new sense of life, which was the first step towards personality restoration and integration of the entire experience. All the complexity of Cathy’s feelings became visible in the black-hole psychodrama. Since it became her familiar experience, Cathy could enter it and herself become the black hole. However, when translated to a psychodrama action, she managed to control it and in the end even found the alternative way out. By staging the black hole Cathy demonstrated all her vulnerability, but also her strength to get outof it and save herself from the nameless horror. In this therapeutic situation Cathy felt protected and the content she “released” afterwards became accessible to psychodrama and group interpretation.

metafora; psihodramska psihoterapija; psihodrama

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