A Book Review of Impromptu Man by Jonathan Moreno

Impromptu Man is a book about the life and work of psychodrama founder and creator Jacob Levy (know and referred to as J.L.) Moreno. The author is his son, Jonathan Moreno.

The book examiners the arc of Moreno’s life and addresses the development of his ideas that lead to the creation of psychodrama and the attendant social science called sociometry. Moreno is honest and direct about his father’s genius and failings, especially in his professional relationships. He describes his father’s personality as being theatrical in nature and bigger than life that included a flair for the dramatic. J.L. was less inclined to be invested in research and the mathematics related to his innovations. He managed to alienate many who may have acknowledged his genius but found him off putting and difficult to deal with. 

He rightly claims that his father was the progenitor of the concepts used to create the social networking tools now widely used in social media as well fathering ideas that lead to improvisational theater, simulation training for the military and leadership trainings for business. 

He added, “J.L. also influenced virtually all the important thinkers whose work contributed to humanistic psychology and the human potential movement that bubbled up in the 1960s.” By that late stage of Moreno’s life he kept a distance from that movement but clearly pointed out that he originated many of their group techniques.

Moreno begins the book describing Clint Eastwood using his father’s idea of “empty chair work” in his presentation at the Republican national convention in 2012. Most were befuddled by Eastwood’s use of an empty chair to represent President Obama and direct questions and comments to the absent leader. Eastwood later shared he came up with the idea right before his presentation by recalling comedians who used some form of an empty chair to represent their absent spouse for comedic effect, etc. He used that example to show the widespread impact of his father’s work. Again, with most not know who the originator was.

As Moreno himself said, “It is not my ideas that are controversial, I am the controversy.” His insights and innovations live on.

To quote from the book: “Today, corporations, the military, and academia require diversity training, and role-playing is commonly used in orientation for all sorts of occupations, including medicine and the law. Role playing is also used to describe online gaming and sadomasochistic bondage. Counter-terrorist operatives are trained using psychodrama. A score of television shows are built around group therapy. Role-playing and psychodrama techniques like the empty chair are part of couples and family therapy.”  The techniques are alive and well used even though Moreno is largely forgotten.

He shares how his father had unbounded creativity and used it in many ways to explore and create ways to merge the catharsis of the theater to the world of group psychotherapy. He is one of the first to use the term group therapy. He believed that we are all brought up in groups, our families, and our healing needs to come through a group process.

His concepts were expansive and the idea that we are all playing roles gave way to the idea that we can train individuals how to take on new roles in business, the military, etc. We can run simulations to practice and develop the skills needed to play those new roles. This adaptation of his work broadens its appeal and the arenas of its application. Unlike many others in his field who thought that medication or talk therapy are the keys to making people’s lives better he believed that the problems we struggle with can be thought of as a lack of spontaneity and creativity which need to be engaged to resolve them.

As the arc of Moreno’s life unfolds, we find out that the author traveled extensively with his father to do his presentations and talks on psychodrama and told friends and acquaintances that he grew up in a mental hospital. Indeed, he did spend his growing up in upstate New York near the town of Beacon where his father ran his institute working with mental patients and training the next generation of psycho-dramatists in his method.

 He concludes the book by doing a role reversal with his father. He plays both roles and switches to his father after he asks him what he thinks of the book he has written. The response he gives is that he did a good job with the book but adds that his mother, Zerka Moreno, deserved more credit. He goes on with the imagined dialogue and ends by his father saying, “Remember that spontaneity and creativity are what the world needs now.”

I  wholeheartedly agree.