The effectiveness of psychodrama in treating disorders: A research design

The EMPoWER research project we are introducing here has been conceived within the framework of the European Daphne initiatives and has already completed the first preliminary organisation opening in the activities promoted during Fepto meetings between 2009 and 2010. The initiative is the second part of a research, already accomplished and directed by Ines Testoni titled “mafia's psychism and female corporeality management”, whose main objective was to understand what are the psychological and social factors exposing woman to the trade of the international prostitution market. The achieved results demonstrate that in several traditionalistic areas, where the family relationship are matrifocal and the social culture is patriarchal, the international mafia gets rich intercepting women and treating them as commodities for sex and servitude trade. It is emerged amongst the main causes of this phenomenon that in the generation mandate between mother and daughter the women’s masochistic attitude towards men is kept unchanged over the centuries. The subordination is a relational mode that the mother teaches to the daughter, demanding her to assimilate it. With the first part of the research already completed, the EMPoWER project has assumed as referring theoretical background the psychoanalytic model of affective codes (Fornari, 1981), differentiating maternal relation forms to paternal ones. Moreover, adding to what has been done, it is assuming a typically innovative prospective, focusing on three elements: a. The first axis on which the work focuses is related to the translation (transfer) of the subordination problem transmitted in the generational mother-daughter mandate in the field of domestic violence. The gender-violence refers to a conflict form, existing in the emotional relationship woman/man, deriving from different reciprocity expectations and social asymmetries resulting from power relations, historically sedimented. The violence against women, besides, is a trans-cultural problem, involving all social classes and every moment of individuals, families and groups cycle of life-The conviction supporting EMPoWER considers the gender violence as an intrinsic element in all patriarchal cultures,and the interruption of the transmission chain (matrilineal from mother to daughter) of this sub cultural element as inevitable (precisely, by virtue of his female transmission line), starting from women themselves and their awareness movement, from a change of position in relation to the status quo in which they are dipped and educated. b. The project is shaped as a intervention-research aimed at co-responsibility factors awareness by woman victim of violence in respect to their own conditions history, that is, the unconscious perpetuation of the role played by mothers in keeping daughters under man’s will and violence. We’ll refer to psycho-social cognitive-behavioural model of self-efficacy of Bandura (1997) and empowering, and to resilience model of Rutter (1985) and Walsh (1998). As a strategy producing a social transformation on a people target, the planned work examines the problem of violence against women starting from the ecological approach (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Stokolos, 1996) focused on the individual and his specific expression centered in the gender prospective, in which primarily is recognised the woman centrality and her subjective truth in relation to herself uncomfortable situation. The fundamental work of acceptance and support towards the exit from the violent situation consist in the woman role re-definition in the mistreating relationship, especially focusing on the dimensions of her resource recovery, through processes leveraging the resilience promotion. Following this perspective highlighting the multi-systemic relations function, the re-construction of a friendly community and social support group, able to help the woman during the change path, is resulting to be fundamental. c. To consider the classic Morenian psychodrama not just as psychotherapy but as the elective methodology to promote in people who have no self-determination power an empowering process. In fact this is a type of intervention able to match with the ecological and multi-systemic approach for resilience promotion, because it is characterized by the group setting, allowing to experiment multiple interpersonal relationships, creating in this way the change conditions through mutual support and awareness of social and relational roles unconsciously internalized and sedimented. Specifically, the continuity between the systemic group and the systemic social dimension guarantees the roles elaboration and transformation, particularly of those roles spotting the achieved impotence, not allowing woman to take a constructive viewpoint of her future. The self creative resources experimentation supports and settles through the psychodrama the reconstruction and redefinition of those roles, keeping women anchored to the violent situation, permitting the experimentation and the construction of new roles more assertive and more selfrespecting.