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I’m not sure how many 94-year olds have published new books this year, but I know that Zerka T. Moreno has published one that is both inspirational and an important document in the history of psychology.
It happens also to be a pleasure to read; my mother is among the last of a generation of deeply cultivated Jewish women who read widely, spoke several languages, and respected the power of the word. (Even though she’s my mother, as a history of science professor I’m going to claim total objectivity!)
Her memoir, To Dream Again, recounts both her remarkable life and her work with her partner, my father J.L. Moreno, a psychiatrist and the pioneer of psychodrama, group psychotherapy, sociometry (social network theory), role playing, encounter groups, and sensitivity training. J.L. died in 1974 just short of his 85th birthday, but as she was 27 years younger Zerka was able to carry on for him.
Though my father was a creative genius, in many ways it was my mother who matured and systematized the way that psychodrama therapy is conducted around the world. (You can watch a little video of her working here.)
To Dream Again begins with the event that shaped most of her life and nearly all of mine: the amputation of her right arm and shoulder at age 39 due to a chondrosarcoma. I was 5 years old, just old enough for the emotions and memories to be seared into my consciousness.
Her side of the story can and should speak for itself. For my part, I remember best my apprehension at her return from the hospital: Would I see blood, I asked my father? I can still see her walking into the front door, a wan smile on her face. I stood as far away as I could, behind our dining room table, as though to protect myself and await reassurance.
That reassurance came quickly, as my next vivid memory is leaning out of our car’s driver’s side window shouting excitedly to the students and staff on the grounds of my father’s sanitarium: “Hey look, my mother’s driving!” She says she was so anxious she was trembling, but I remember only the thrill of this, the first of her many self-rehabilitated accomplishments.
The book is about much else, of course: Her family’s origins and struggles to survive the catastrophes of 20th century Europe; her adventures as a 22-year old immigrant in 1939; her complicated relationship with her bipolar elder sister that resulted in her meeting my father; their lives together vaulting through the world of psychotherapy from the 1940s through the early 1970s; and her energetic and charismatic career since then.
Along the way there are nuggets of observation about the political and social upheavals of the era, including their sometimes harrowing cold war travels to the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc countries, all in the name of advancing my father’s passion for a form of psychotherapy that would truly embrace all of society.
Practitioners and students will especially enjoy her accounts of encounters with the famous and near famous in psychology and the theater. Psychodrama was at that time a unique venue that attracted both scientists and actors. Among the attendees at their nightly public psychodrama sessions on the Upper West Side of Manhattan she remembers a young man who reminded her of a sardine, whom she later came to recognize as Woody Allen. As the 1960s encounter movement cannibalized my father’s ideas, Abe Maslow wrote a letter of protest to Life magazine, which had covered Fritz Perls’ gestalt therapy without mentioning J.L.’s lifetime of prior work on group methods. (And, I might add, without the excesses of that time that did much damage.)
Characters like Eric Bentley, Paul Tillich, Carl Rogers, Norman Mailer, Karl Menninger, Jacques Lacan, Virginia Satir, Margaret Mead (with whom I had a long dinner conversation at age 10), and even the Huxley’s pepper these pages, among many others.
But enough from me. To Dream Again is not only a present to the world and a beautiful work of literature, it is also a Mother’s Day gift to a grateful son.
Happy Mother’s Day, mom!
