Report of a Black Psychodramatist and the Commitments of Brazilian Psychodrama in a the 21st Century

Abstract

This text was written based on an invitation to present a plenary session at the 24th Brazilian Psychodrama Congress and the 2nd IAGP Latin American Regional Conference. I rescued the political meaning of the History of Psychodrama to construct a speech problematizing my place as a black woman. Psychodrama is marked in its origins by the political context and Socionomy has been consolidated over these more than one hundred years in permanent dialogue with society. In Brazil, Group Therapy arrived in the 1940s with the Experimental Black Theater and analyzed the issue of blackness and racism in the country. The instruments of Psychodrama are essential therapeutic resources in the search for transformation and in the composition of this action involved with reality; stage, protagonist, auxiliary ego, direction and audience expand the possibilities of thinking about reality through fantasy and intend to rescue spontaneity. Thus, dramatic action is a relationship of forces between cultural preservation and spontaneity, and for this reason a parallel is established here between the concepts of power and resistance in Foucault. There is no interest in establishing a synonym between them, but rather in emphasizing the relationship of forces that articulates them. It is from this understanding that I report on the importance of speech and writing as an exercise of resistance of this “other”, “subject”, which is me, as a black psychodramatist, highlighting the intersectional aspects that make up the political scenario and questioning what the commitments of Brazilian Psychodrama would be in the 21st century.