A Historical Chronology of

Group Psychotherapy and

Psychodrama
Adam Blatner, M.D.

(Revised, June 30, 2002)

(This was Appendix A in the 3rd edition (1988) of my book, Foundations of

Psychodrama. It was taken out because the book had gotten to long and cuts needed to
be made. So here it is again.)

Early Pioneers

1905: Joseph H. Pratt, an internist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, offered

inspirational lectures to patients with tuberculosis. He gathered his patients into groups
and explained to them the necessity of hygienic instructions and exhorted them to be
submissive to his will. This "classroom method" was descriptively called "thought
control," and other doctors employed the same method in a variety of physical disorders
(Pratt, 1907). Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, Pratt gave informational talks to psychiatric
patients at the Boston Dispensary in which he placed less emphasis on the disease and
more on the emotions and their effect on psychoneuroses. The group became for him
the focal point of therapy (Pratt, 1945).

1908-1911: Jacob L. Moreno began to experiment with creative drama with children in
Vienna. 1912: Moreno organized the first self-help group, with the disadvantaged class
of prostitutes in Vienna.

1917-1918: Moreno worked with Tyrolean refugees of World War I who were relocated
to a camp on the outskirts of Vienna; here he developed his earliest ideas about
sociometry.

1921: E. W. Lazell worked with World War I veterans at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in
Washington, DC. His procedure was similar to Pratt's, but he worked with mentally ill
patients and called his lectures to the patients on psychoanalytic dynamics "group
analysis" (Lazell, 1921).

1921: Alfred Adler and Rudolph Dreikurs in Vienna held case conferences with
teachers, families, and the child or teenager all together and did some of their
counseling in these settings. Later, Dreikurs worked with groups of alcoholics in Vienna
before coming to the United States.

1921-1924: J. L. Moreno organized his "Theatre of Spontaneity" in Vienna, the

beginning of what was to become psychodrama. (Moreno set the date of April 1, 1921
as the "official" beginning of psychodrama.) In 1923 he published Das Stegreiftheatre
(the Theatre of Spontaneity), in which he wrote about ideas regarding spontaneity
research, role theory, and action studies. He also designed the first theater-in-the-round
(Held, 1982). Moreno considered the period from 1911 to 1923 the first
"axionormative" period, the time when the basic philosophical foundations were laid in
the development of sociometric theory (Renouvier, 1958).

1922: Sigmund Freud speculated on group dynamics in his paper "Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego."

1923-1930: Trigant Burrow worKed intensively witn some experimental groups and
(beginning in 1918) used psychoanalytic methods in the group setting. He used the
group to reduce the authority of the analyst and developed some interesting social
theories of behavior.

1927-1929: J. L. Moreno demonstrated role playing at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York
(and elsewhere).

1929: Louis Wender began to do group work that was psychoanalytically oriented
(Weeder, 1951).

1929-1930: L. Cody Marsh, a minister at Kings Park State Hospital in New York,
brought a revivalist-style spirit to the task of helping his patients: "By the crowd they
have been broken, by the crowd shall they be healed." He broadcast inspirational talks
and instituted ideas of "milieu treatment." He considered each patient to be a student
who received his "condition" as part of learning about "the great subject of civilization"
and who needed to experience being "reeducated" (Marsh, 1931). During this period,
Austin Riggs also lectured over loudspeakers to psychiatric patients in a Stockhridge,
Massachusetts, hospital.

1929-1930: Moreno offered Impromptu Theater, combining psychodrama and group

dynamics, at Carnegie Hall.

1931: Moreno consulted as a psychiatrist at Sing Sing prison in New York and began to
write about the use of group psychotherapy.

1932: J. L. Moreno first coined the terms "group therapy" and "group psychotherapy" at
a conference of the American Psychiatric Association in Philadelphia, after doing basic
research on prison populations. (He was encouraged to do this work by William
Alanson White.) Moreno's approach of truly interactional, group-centered methods was
in contrast to earlier group methods that were often classes in mental health, taught by
lecture and exhortation.

1933: Moreno consulted at the New York State Training School for Girls in Hudson,
New York, in collaboration with Helen Hall Jennings; and over the next several years
he introduced role playing and worked out his sociometric system. On April 4, he
exhibited some of his early charts at the New York Medical Society convention; he
considered this the official start of the "sociometric movement."

1934: Moreno published his big book on sociometry, Who Shall Survive A New
Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations. He also introduced psychodrama at
St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, DC, which was one of the most dynamic
psychiatric centers in the country at the time. He received a good deal of support from
many of the leaders in the profession.

1934: Samuel R. Slavson, an engineer volunteering with the Jewish Board of Guardians'
Big Sister Program, began to do volunteer arts and crafts activities with groups of
teenage girls in group homes. He went on to become allied to psychoanalysis and began
to expand his activities, calling it "ego therapy" and applying it to groups of latency age
and finally even preschool children. He considered his work "pare-analytic," and it
involved generally permissive play therapy and lectures.

1934: Paul Schilder at Bellevue Hospital in New York organized psychoanalytically

oriented groups for both inpatients and outpatients. In these, he would interpret both
resistance and transference phenomena.

1936: Moreno opened Beacon Hill Sanitarium, a private psychiatric hospital about 60
miles north of New York City on the Hudson River, with an attached psychodrama
theater and facilities for training professionals. (This is also the year he became a
naturalized citizen.)

1937: Moreno began the publication of his first professional journal, Sociometry: A
Journal of Interpersonal Relations. (He used the term "interpersonal relations" before
it became the name of the approach used by Harry Stack Sullivan.) He applied
sociometric testing procedures to Public School 181 in Brooklyn. Moreno considered
this year the beginning of the "second sociometric phase."

1937: Lauretta Bender (Schilder's wife and a major pioneer in child psychiatry), also at
Bellevue, organized play therapy groups with emotionally disturbed children (Bender,
1937).

1936-1937: Kurt Lewin, Muzafer Sharif, and other social psychologists began important
studies in group dynamics, although it was not oriented to therapy.

1937: Abraham A. Low, in Chicago, used "will training" in his work with the mentally
ill; later, in 1941, he organized Recovery, Inc., a self-help group program that used
discussion and the reading of selected books of his as an aftercare program.

1937: Alcoholics Anonymous, started a few years earlier in Akron, Ohio, was beginning
to be recognized.

1940: S. H. Foulkes and E. James Anthony organized the Group Analytic Society in
Northfield, England.

The Period of Expansion

1941: A psychodrama theater was built and put into operation at St. Elizabeth's Hospital
in Washington, DC.

1941-1945: During World War II, group therapy began to be used widely in military
and veterans hospitals.
1942: J. L. Moreno organized the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and
Psychodrama (ASGPP), the first professional association for group therapists. He also
opened the Sociometric Institute and Theater of Psychodrama at 101 Park Avenue in
New York City and began to offer open sessions, attracting many curious professionals
from a variety of disciplines. This was the beginning of what he considered the "third
phase of sociometric development," which was followed by the spread of group
psychotherapy, sociometry, and psychodrama, nationally and internationally. (Moreno's
open sessions continued on weekend nights until the early 1970s. In 1962, he moved
this "storefront setting" to 236 West 78th Street.)

1943: S. R. Slavson founded the American Group Psychotherapy Association (AGPA),

which was oriented toward psychoanalytic practice. He also began publishing The
International Journal of Group Psychotherapy.

1945: Moreno began publication of his second journal, Sociatry, which later became the
official professional organ of the ASGPP and after 2 years was renamed Group
Psychotherapy. The next year (1946) he published Psychodrama (Volume 1) (Corsini
& Putzey, 1956). Many other books and articles followed, as noted in the Bibliography
to Blatner's Books.

1946-1949: A. Snedeker, as Surgeon-General, instituted a policy to make group

psychotherapy the principal form of psychiatric treatment in Veterans Administration
hospitals.

1946-1950: J. D. Sutherland, S. H. Foulkes, and H. Ezriel applied psychoanalysis in

groups at the Tavistock Clinic in London. Wilfred Bion, a follower of Melanie Klein,
began to research group culture. This group began publication of a journal, Human
Relations A Journal of Small Group Research.

1946: Joshua Bierer, in England, had integrated Adlerian ideas and written about group
work and social psychiatry since 1938. He created social clubs for recovering patients.

1946-1947: Nathan Ackerman began to write about his early use of conjoint group
methods in dealing with families.

1946-1947: The National Training Laboratories at Bethel, Maine, began their

community development conferences, which later evolved into the T-group and then the
encounter group. Several of the leaders had been students of Kurt Lewin and J. L.
Moreno. The key figures were Ronald Lippitt, Kenneth Benne, Leland Bradford, and
Jack Gibb (Gottschalk & Pattison, 1969; Lippitt, Bradford, & Benne, 1947).

1948-1949: Alexander Wolf said individual psychoanalysis could be done in a group

setting, and in his writings he noted that the group context recreates patients' family
dynamics in many ways.

1949: Robert Bartlett Haas applied group theories and psychodrama to educational
contexts, both in the classroom and on playgrounds.

1949-1955: Maxwell Jones developed the concept of the '`therapeutic community" at

the Social Rehabilitation Unit (later renamed Henderson Hospital) of the Belmont
Hospital in Sutton, England. Around that time, Paul Sivadon in France pioneered the
idea of open (unlocked) wards.

1950-1960: Expansion of group psychotherapy, especially by such leaders as Martin

Grotjahn, Hyman Spotnitz, Jerome Frank, Florence Powdermaker, Clifford Sager,
Helen Papanek, Max Rosenbaum, Helen Durkin, and many others. Children were
treated in groups by Haim Ginott, Gisela Konopka, Fritz Redl, and others.

1955-1959: Sensitivity training, an extension of T-group ideas, was being explored at

the UCLA School of Business Administration in California and in other locations as
part of the expansion of the National Training Laboratories.

The Period of Innovation

1958-1966: Frederick (Fritz) Perls, Laura Perls, Paul Goodman, Ralph Hefferline, and
others developed Gestalt therapy in New York; it became popular after Fritz Perls
moved to the Esalen Institute in California around 1966.

1963-1966: Marathon (time-extended) group therapy (mainly for personal growth);

Frederick Stoller, George Bach, Elizabeth Mintz.

1963-1966: Eric Berne developed his method of Transactional Analysis.

1963-1966: Michael Murphy and Richard Price organized Esalen Institute just south of
Big Sur, California. It was the prototype of the "growth center," and hundreds sprouted
up around the country (and some overseas) over the next decade. These centers became
the focus of the human potential movement, which was a marriage of humanistic
psychology and T-group methods.

1967: Will Schutz, at Esalen, combined many modes of therapy with the process of the
basic encounter group psychodrama, bioenergetic analysis, sensory awakening, guided
fantasy, and a variety of action techniques, many of which were ultimately based on
Moreno's methods.

1967: Synanon "games" opened to the public as a form of encounter group in Santa
Monica, a seaside suburb on the west side of Los Angeles. Synanon was started in 1958
as a drug abuse treatment center by Charles Diedrich. These games were just short of
being violently confrontational, and some of this approach generalized to contaminate
parts of the encounter group movement.

1968: Hindu gurus, swamis, and Eastern spiritual teachers and disciplines were
becoming fashionable, in part stimulated by the support of the Beatles for the Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi and his system of transcendental meditation. The use of psychedelic
agents added to metaphysical interest, and group therapies began integrating
transpersonal issues.

In the 1960s, a number of other forms of psychotherapy became relatively popular, and
some of these approaches were applied in group contexts: family therapy (involving
several families at a time); art, movement, and other expressive therapies; Arthur
Janov's primal therapy; William Glasser's reality therapy; and the like.
Around this period of aroused community action in all areas, self-help groups for
smokers, eaters, gays, and gamblers; various special medical problem groups; families
of reading-disabled children and mentally ill adults; and many other categories
expanded the concept of group work tremendously. Hospice centers were formed and
began to offer bereavement groups in the mid-1970s.

ln summary, 1 believe the next frontier for the use of group therapy will be its natural
integration into all aspects of our society, as more people develop the skills to utilize the
group context to facilitate management, education, recreation, and political action.

References

Bender, L. (1937). Group activities on a children's ward as a method of psychotherapy.

American Journal of Psychiatry, 93, 151 - 173.

Corsini, Raymond J., & Putzey, J. J. (1956). Bibliography on group psychotherapy.

Group Psychotherapy, 9(3), 177-249.

Gottschalk, Louis, & Pattison, E. Mansell. (1969). Psychiatric perspectives on T-groups

and the laboratory method: An overview. American Journal of Psychiatry, 126(6), 824.

Held, R. L. (1982). Endless innovations: Frederick Kreisler's theory and scenic design
(pp. 33-36). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Lazell, E. W. (1921). The group treatment of dementia praecox. Psychoanalytic Review,

8, 168- 179.

Lippitt, Ronald, Bradford, Leland P., & Benne, Kenneth D. (1947). Sociodramatic
clarification of leader and group roles, as a starting point for effective group
functioning. Sociatry: A Journal of Group and Intergroup Therapy, 1(1), 82-91. (Note
that these and other pioneers of the T-group method also published a number of their
first papers on what was to later become the encounter group in Moreno's journals
around 1947!)

Marsh, L. C. (1931). Group treatment of the psychoses by the psychological equivalent

of the revival. Mental Hygiene in New York, 15, 328-349.

Pratt, J. H. (1907). The organization of tuberculosis classes. Medical Communications

of the Massachusetts Medical Society, 20, 475-492.

Pratt, J. H. (1945). Group method in the treatment of psychosomatic disorders.

Sociometry, 8, 323-331.

Renouvier, Pierre. (1958). The group psychotherapy movement and J. L. Moreno, its
pioneer and founder. Group Psychotherapy, 11(1), 69-86.

Wender, Louis. (1951). Reflections on group psychotherapy. Quarterly Review of

Psychiatry and Neurology, 6, 246-248.