Paper short abstract:

How does a childhood marked by displacement reshape and press into the psychotherapeutic imaginary of the 'inner child'? To answer this question, this paper draws on 6 months of preliminary fieldwork at the Lod Theatre, a psychodrama center located in a low-income, migrant neighborhood in Israel.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s, psychodrama has proliferated as Israeli psychiatry’s response to unremarked social ills (e.g. poverty, legal discrimination). Psychodrama is an expressive mode of psychotherapy that invokes role-play games to rework the subject’s relationship to herself and others. To this end, psychodrama aims to channel the spontaneity of children’s play in order to reframe suffering within “dramatic reality,” where dreams and fantasies gain tangible expression on stage (Pendzik 2006). Classical psychodrama theorists paint both concrete children and the figure of the inner-child as plastic, spontaneous, and ungoverned by social norms (Moreno 1946; Nolte 2014). This paper draws from six months of preliminary fieldwork at the Lod Theatre Center, a psychodrama center in a low-income, diverse, migrant neighborhood. It synthesizes material from the clinical archives with the author’s ethnographic research on the center’s therapeutic theatre production Tlushim (Torn); a play grappling with the inter-generational legacy of Lod’s mass transit camps. These camps interned Arab-Jews and Holocaust survivors during the 1950s. This paper asks, how do patient and clinician experiences with war, displacement, and ethno-nationalism reshape and press into the psychodramatic formulation of the inner-child and theories of selfhood and child development? This paper suggests that ethnographic attention to the voice of the child in the play Tlushim allows us to track how clinical experimentation with dramaturgy reshapes a biomedical model of healing. Moreover, the paper suggests that close attention to these aesthetic renderings of childhood complicates a universalist therapeutic imaginary of the inner-child.