Dungeons, Dragons, and Psychodrama
The psychic structure of D&D
There has been a recent surge of interest in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as well as psychological literature trying to catch up with this phenomenon. While I will be drawing from recent studies on the topic, my aim here is of a different persuasion. I would like to look at D&D as a form of psychodrama, a structure of psychosocial interactions developed by Jacob Moreno (1889–1974). My goal here is to understand more clearly the dynamics of the D&D game and how its structure contributes to these dynamics.
Psychodrama
Psychodrama: Against Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalyst Jacob Moreno developed a method of psychotherapy when he became disillusioned with the practice of classical psychoanalysis. He called his new form of therapy psychodrama, emphasizing the theatrical aspect of the ‘treatment’ (a very liberal use of the term). His departure from the Freudians was grounded in three critiques of this orthodox form of therapy.
First, Freudians made no room for action, or lived experience in the concrete world. Rather, the endeavor of psychoanalysis was, Moreno argued, much too concerned with fantasy and with talking about fantasy. This, he claimed, lacked the most important thing in life: our everyday lives are concrete experiences; they are situated and contextual and physical. Fantasy is not purely mental — it is also social-existential. Thus, we cannot ‘cure’ pathology by talking it out; we cannot even accurately interpret anything correctly because we are relying on the patient’s description of their lives, not their actual lives.
Second, he criticized the atomizing character of the Freudian technique. If life is lived with and among others, shouldn’t psychotherapy also always be among others in certain situations? In this attack, Moreno is saying that analysis is a “reduced reality”, an “infra-reality”; in short, it isn’t realistic. We need a therapy, he says, that embraces the difficulty of the social experience we live in shared reality, not one that praises the internal fantasy life of an individual. We need a stage at which to act out our realities among others, to test the waters, to challenge our boundaries, and so on — as well as feeling and experiencing the realistic consequences when others respond.
Third, psychoanalysis does not seem to address two fundamental and universal elements of human experience: time and space. Yes, psychoanalysis is known for its emphasis on historical time; but Moreno believed that the lived experience was the here and now, not the ‘then’. Psychotherapy, then, should recenter the treatment on the present encounter. Nor do Freudians address space, another everyday constituent. We live in space, our actions and lives are dictated and structured by the organization of space around us. Psychotherapy needs to take this into account as well, and not by sequestering off the patient in a stuffy room and confining her to a couch.
Psychodrama and the Life of the Act
Moreno’s solution, or set of alternatives, to these shortcomings of classical psychoanalysis was psychodrama, developed in the 1920s and 30s. It was to become the embodiment of his critiques of his former profession — an overcoming of its limitations. Already in the late 1910s, Moreno, along with his classical analytic practice in Vienna, was running a theater on the side. The theater was the Stegreiftheater, or “Theater of Spontaneity.” When he immigrated to New York in 1925, he threw himself into his new practice of psychodrama.
There were five instruments of the psychodrama:
- Stage: should be relatively bare so that it could be maximally flexible in order to allow the actors to more freely project their life onto it;
- Subject/Actor/Protagonist: the actor (formerly “patient”) is taught to be himself, but to also explore what this means through different theatrical perspectives (e.g., exaggeration; playing only a certain personality trait of himself; etc.), and should, above, be spontaneous;
- Director: has two roles — analyst (analyzing events and giving interpretations) and producer (who stays alert to every turn in the play so as to free obstacles in the way of the creative spontaneity of the actor(s); who also attempts to direct a crisis or turning point at every point he can so what the actor can practice living different modes of life spontaneously);
- Staff: extra people to act in the play to function as a transitional space between the actor and the director, what Moreno referred to as “alter-egos”;
- Audience: a sounding board and external witness to give recognition to the actor’s lived experience.
At the beginning of the psychodrama production, there will naturally be some resistance of the actor towards the director and the production as a whole. This is to be expected, Moreno tells us, and will be worked through as the actor slowly comes to realize that this production is driven by her own spontaneity and personality than by the director’s wishes, who will even “recede from the scene” (symbolically) once this phase of the psychodrama has been resolved. This, however, is from the actor’s point of view. The director still performs his directives, but from a receded, structural position, not an active, evident one. It is at this point that psychodrama begins. The actor now populates the stage with his fantasy life. Rather than feeling that his father or mother or friend is ‘out there’, an external object, he is finding himself acting out these fantasies, responding to them, and understanding them. The dissociated/unconscious fantasies come to the fore in the form of a role. A lengthy but telling quote from Moreno:
[The actor] has invested so much of his own limited energy in the images of his perceptions of the people in his world as well as in certain images which live a forgotten existence within him, delusions and hallucinations of all sorts, that he has lost a great deal of spontaneity, productivity, and power for himself … [His fantasies] have taken his riches away, and he has become poor, weak, and sick. The psychodrama gives back to him all the investments he had made in the extraneous adventures of his mind. He takes his father, mother, sweetheart, delusions unto himself and the energies which he has invested in them. They return by his actually living through the role of father or employer, friend or enemy. By reversing the roles with them he is already learning many things about them which life does not provide him. When he can be the persons he hallucinates, not only do they lose their power and magic spell over him, but he gains their power for himself. His own self has an opportunity to find and reorganize itself, to put the elements together which may have been kept apart by insidious forces, to integrate them and to attain a sense of power and relief, a catharsis of integration.
The self, for Moreno, is reorganized in the externalization, exaggeration, and playful confrontation with its own internalized, and internalizing, fantasy life. Why this happens, and how this is possible, is enabled by Moreno’s belief that individuals develop personalities and types of acting in the world based on fantasies of their roles in a specific situation. That is, we learn and internalize what we do in different contexts. This becomes pathological when it becomes rigid and inhibiting. By idealizing our father, we inhibit ourselves from leaving the role of child. Or when we see our role in society as the ‘victim’, we lose sight of personal agency or responsibility and always blame others (likewise for those who see themselves as “the strong”; they forget this is usually compensation for fear of shame), our personality becomes rigid, unable to adapt to new information or experiences.
So, dramatic enactment is the actor’s opportunity to reorganize their internalized roles that have inhibited or reified their subjective experience by exposing them for what they are: roles. There is nothing inherently tying an actor to playing the role of idealizing child or victim, and it is only when the actor plays out those roles among others can they truly sense this.
The Psychodramatic Structure of Dungeons and Dragons
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was developed in the 1970s by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. It’s generally referred to as a TTRPG (Table Top Role Playing Game), a genre of cooperative games of which there are dozens.
D&D has enjoyed a sort of a renaissance in recent years, and there has been numerous recent academic articles published on the subject (e.g., Henrich & Worthington, 2021). There must be something compelling about Dungeons and Dragons. Something about sitting down with friends every Thursday, escaping from everydayness, and diving into a world of fantasy is enticing to many people. It’s really no different from reading Tolkien or watching Game of Thrones… but actually it’s quite different. It is different owing to its psychodramatic structure. The work of Moreno will explain to us what the essence of D&D is, and why it engages so many people on such deep levels. It made sense to interview these players for whom D&D has made an impression, and their quotes and sentiments will be leading our investigation.
Moreno developed psychodrama as a way for the individual to engage with their personality on an active level. To do this, the ‘actor’ explored the different roles they have internalized with other people in a common setting, the stage. The director functioned as a mediator whose primary purpose was to construct a situation so that the individual can be invited to engage with himself and others on a more spontaneous level.
If you’ve ever played D&D, this should sound familiar. We all gather on a consistent basis on a neutral stage to engage with each other in a specific role to complete a common task. The DM — or dungeon master — exists in a position of symbolic authority, but whose presence should never feel as though the player’s autonomy and spontaneity is unnecessarily limited. To do this, obstacles should be removed from the players’ creative endeavors and inspirations. There are basic rules to D&D to ensure a smooth running of the game, but if done right, they shouldn’t be felt as rules; more as a general outline of the ‘production’ (in Moreno’s terms).
The Characters We Play
One regular player who I interviewed stated that they typically create characters who are the ‘face’ of the group. They are the primary agent that interact with NPCs (non-playable characters), function as the informal leader of the group, and so on. And, while they consider themselves charismatic at times, they noted that they “struggle with social anxiety”. In their words, they play “an idealized version of myself”. This is what the structure of D&D can open up for people, and partially explains why the game is so captivating for so many.
Moreno realized early on that our personalities are not singular; they are multifaceted with many different ‘personalities’ nested within who we consider ourselves to be. Not only that, but the many facts of our personalities are always in relation to other people, and their personalities. Psychodrama would allow, he believed, the individual to become an actor of possibility. The person could tap into the many layers of themselves and bring out what they idealized, what they dreaded, what they hated and loved. And it didn’t cause catastrophe. A classic example of when our personality becomes rigid is the individual who is too afraid to be assertive when needed. They fear that their interlocutor will be offended or push back. To become assertive for the shy requires a true moment of courage, of risking who they deeply are. If we conceive of D&D psychodramatically, the particular campaign allows us to do this in a safe environment without taking away courage or creativity.
The motivations for playing this or that character is insightful into the personality of the player — and the players usually know this. One player reported:
While I don’t agree with the methods [my character] chooses to enact vengeance, it is cathartic playing a character who had the backbone to stand up against his family and church when I did not have the strength to do that in real life.
There is thus an exploration of the aspect of the personality — courage, perhaps to the point of violence — that is explored by the player in real-time on the stage of the campaign. The internal logic of this player’s dynamics is fleshed out in the character among other characters.
Another player reported that their character is more serious, lawful, and organized, something the player wishes they were more like. This intonates a kind of wishful construction of personality that the player then ‘acts out’ on the field with others. It would take a massive effort to determine if there were long-term outcomes of this. Would this player, over the course of the campaign, become more organized and lawful in their ‘real life’? Unfortunately, it seems like too many confounding variables would get in the way of drawing solid causality. In any case, this is not my concern here; nor is it the immediate concern of the players. The point is to explore these aspects in a cooperative fantasy setting — or in Moreno’s words quoted above: to achieve a “catharsis of integration.”
Becoming Spontaneous
According to Moreno, an essential (perhaps the fundamental) function of the director was to remove obstacles in the way of the actor’s spontaneity. Spontaneity, for him, was a trait becoming quickly extinct in our precise and industrialized modern lives; and it was the key to recovering a full and rich life. The neurotic was a person whose spontaneity was crushed by rigid roles, institutions, and implicit rules of society.
The players I interviewed all reported that giving the world and story basic structure without intruding on the player’s experience as the primary role of the DM. In psychodramatese, the DM is to “recede from the scene.” What the players want, what is central to the experience of D&D, is the ability and capacity to grow one’s experience of themselves and their world. This is what is at stake in the DM’s presence. Similar to Winnicott’s notion of creativity, the very words spoken by the DM (in the case of analysis, the analyst — and, in the case of psychodrama, the director) can, in an act of violence, cut off the exploratory and spontaneous efforts of the player.
Due to the symbolic authority of the DM, they have the capacity to over-determine the course of a campaign, and thus of the character’s experiences. Thus, it is incumbent upon the DM to leave the space for freedom as open as possible for their players. Naturally, in the beginning of a campaign, as Moreno noted of the psychodrama, there will be a tension between the players and the DM, with probing questions such as, “How much freedom do I have? What is the nature of this DM’s reign? Can I push the limits here? What about here?” And so on. The best dynamic between the DM and their players will be one of cooperation. An interviewee stated that the players should remember that the DM is a ‘player’ as well, but of a slightly different function.
The Stories We Tell
A final note on the psychodramatics of D&D. A regular DM/player brought to my attention the importance of storytelling in the process of a campaign. When asked what the purpose of the DM is, they reported
To set and create the world we are playing in, and to set the pace of the characters’ actions, as well as collaborate on storytelling with the players.
People find something wonderful in telling stories with others. It has been noted by many scholars that much of human history has been told in story, in the oral tradition. D&D taps into this social co-construction of a shared experience. Building something with and among others is clearly a profound experience for people, and our society does not reward this type of creativity. We reward cooperation when it serves the ulterior motive of market competition, but not when it ‘serves’ something superfluous. But, indeed, superfluity is what makes D&D so enticing.
Art is when managed productivity stops. An object becomes art when it is done for its own purpose, not when it is done for the market, or for competing with other artists. D&D can be said to be of the same species of object. Perhaps what makes the game ideal for mutual storytelling is precisely its superfluity, it’s technical uselessness. A group of friends gather once a week to engage in an activity where spontaneity, creativity, and personal exploration takes place in the context of mutual storytelling. When the session ends, nothing is ‘gained’; nothing is left to be exploited. The soil upon which the game is played stays rich and fecund for more storytelling next week.
[Insights from Psychotherapy]
Henrich, S. & Worthington, R. (2021). Let your clients fight dragons: A rapid evidence assessment regarding the therapeutic utility of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’. Journal of Creativity in Mental Health.
Moreno, J. L. (1987). The Essential Moreno: Writings on Psychodrama, Group Method, and Spontaneity. J. Fox (ed.).
