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Dr. Peter Olsson has self-published paperbacks that run the gamut about destructive and apocalyptic cults, Osama bin Laden, and domestic terrorism in America. Adventures in Psychodrama, while apparently more clerical in tone and centered on relatively sane, down-to-earth patients, is not entirely separate in scope. War criminals or veterans, recovering junkies, and those badly maimed by injury beyond the physical are sometimes tough patients to pull out of a self-destructive rut; doctors cannot be the ones to judge. As readers, we are ourselves like patients taking a journey in Peter Olsson's Adventures of Psychodrama. If the long cast of characters in Dr. Olsson's self-published book, among them Vietnam War survivors and victims of savage child abuse, had been captured via writing in their prime instead of long after, this book might have read more like a series of synopses of one-acts that, if treated as one long play, might educate audience members of the group session or readers of the book. In that way, through all the different channels, one would experience the darkest conceivable shades of trauma from the past in the present.
The steps of administering psychodrama therapy to a small group of patients sound remarkably like handing out rules in a theater or theater-writing class, and it's an analogy that comes back. There are five classic phases of psychodrama: (1) warm-up, (2) setting the scene, (3) rising action, (4) climax, (5) audience group share-back (p. 12). In order for a psychodrama group session to be effective, a doctor leading a group of six or so participants must get a bit creative, since most of the trauma being treated in Adventures in Psychodrama is awkward to pin down and actually treat.
“As his own headache, [a patient] Pat proceeded to describe what he felt were his numerous past sins of getting numerous women pregnant and not caring for the children that resulted,” writes Olsson, describing one instance in which a session of psychodrama ther