Obeisance!
Zerka Moreno, Jacob Moreno’s widow, psychodrama pioneer and group therapy pioneer, continued to work to promote the high-level method and after his death in 1974. Dr. Moreno and Zerka began working together soon after they met 1941. They founded the Psychodrama Institute in in Beacon, New York in 1942, and began publishing a magazine for group psychotherapy in 1947. Zerka is his partner in the development and practice of psychodrama and group therapy, co-founder of the International Association for Group Psychotherapy and of the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. She is an author of dozens of books and articles, released her memoirs “To Dream Again” in 2012.
I first got acquined with Zerka and Psychodrama at the IX-th Annual Congress of IAGP in Zagreb, 1986. This determined not only the course of my professional development, but also the course of development of Psychotherapy in Bulgaria. What followed next was 3 years of correspondence with Zerka and the other psychodramatists who I met in Zagreb, before the start of training of the first psychodramatists in Bulgaria took place in October 1989. Throughout these 3 years I could feel Zerka’s genuine support for the implementation of this dream of mine, to learn psychodrama. She managed to persuade Goran Hogberg from Sweden to seek and find financial support for his trips to Bulgaria for our Psychodrama training and education. Those were the turbulent times of transition for our country, and the need of financial support for us, the candidates for education, had been out of question.
In the years following, Zerka continued supporting the development of psychodrama here in a number of different ways. During those hard years I could always feel not only her encouragment and stimulation of our professional development, but also the warm friendship and the personal closeness. We exchanged many real, and sometimes psychodramatic letters. Hers were written with her only hand – the left.The chance to stay in touch with Zerka was not only o honour, but a source of strength and stability to me in a time when there was hardly enough of both.
Zerka’s generosity allowed me to take part in 2 ten-day long training seminars in the Theater of Moreno in Highland in 1992 and 1994, in the two-day long pre-congress trainings of IAGP in Amsterdam 1989 and in Montreal 1992, and in a 7-day training in Holwell Center of Marcia Carp in 1997. This allowed me to learn from her masterful way of directing the protagonist in-depth and in perspective. It gave me the chance to feel the broadness, warmth and freedom of relationships within the group culture that Zerka creates. In some of those big and very colorful groups I experienced the deepest of my personal works, directed by Zerka, and also received very helpful direct supervision and feedback from her for my work.
Unfortunately, Zerka’s trip to Bulgaria, which had been planned and prepared for, failed because of the accident in Riga. I am truly sorry that I couldn’t show Zerka her father-in-law’s Motherland, as well as for the encounter with all Moreno’s followers in Bulgaria that didn’t take place.
At 99, on September 19, 2017, Zerka Moreno left this world.
Dear Zerka, I learned a lot from you! But there are a few expressions of yours that are always in my mind and that I always pass on to my students. These are:
“The protagonist doesn’t owe you a catharsis”
“Trust to the process!”
“When I’m being asked what qualities a future psychodramatists should have, I answer – love and respect to the human being.”
“Psychodrama is an instrument, just like the scalpel – you can cut out a tumor with it, but you can also kill a person with it. It is very important to whom we give this instrument to; equally important are the skills and the ethics of the person, who is holding the scalpel.”
Zerka, you keep living in my heart and I will continue to write psychodramatic letters to you.
With love, respect, admiration and deep gratitude,
Gabi
(Dr. Galabina Tarashoeva)
at Moreno family’s home, Beacon, New York, 1992