Dr. Jacob Levi Moreno developed his ideas on mental health, its disturbance and restoration in his works on role theory, theory of spontaneity, which developed into theory of action, the concepts of Tele, Encounter, Social Atom and Social Space, Sociometry and Group Therapy
At the beginning of the 20th century Dr. Sigmund Freud focused attention on the conscious and unconscious experiences of individuals and introduced psychoanalytical understanding of a person in health and illness and respectively created a method for the treatment of mental illnesses.
While maintaining profound respect to the individual and individuality, Moreno broke the idea of the holy unity of the individual, according to which feelings, emotions and ideas must reside in a single structure where they can appear, function and die away. He believed that feelings, emotions and ideas could leave organisms as well as enter into them. According to him, there are structures outside the individual where the flow of emotions and feelings can reside – and these, precisely, are interpersonal spaces.
In his descriptions of both the encounter and the tele phenomenon equality, reciprocity and mutuality between the two are prominent, here and now, – in contrast to the psychoanalytical concepts of transference, projection, etc., which have a subject and an object and the significant event takes place at some different place or time.
In addition to the significance of the category of the moment, Moreno also highlighted another category which was overlooked until then – enactment. According to Moreno a person is a performer of roles
And let’s not forget that at the end of his life Moreno wished to be remembered as the man who brought the laughter into psychotherapy.
Immediately next to the grave of Moreno in the Vienna cemetery there is a statue of Orpheus and Eurydice