Dream images and
psychodramatic images
The interest in the nature and significance of dreams harks back to antiquity. Divination and prophecies were very soon attached to dream images, taken as symbols.Dream images, the same as symptoms, are pieces of irrationality, which invade our rational, logic quotidianity, something odd into our everyday life. It is for this reason that they were for a long time considered as coming from other world. It is for this reason also that Freud regarded the dream as supplying a ‘royal road’ to the unconscious. In dreams, visual imagery is the main part. The language of the dreams is much more pictorial than linguistic. The dream is thus the realm of images.
"Our thought processes were formed in Greece and inherited by Rome… Intellectual inquiry and logic are pagan. Every inquiry is preceded by a roving eye, and once the eye begins to rove, it cannot be morally controlled" (C. Paglia). The monotheist cultures, like Judeo-Christianity, are based on word rather than image, laying aside or even putting a taboo on visual representation.
Now in the era of the triumph of mass media, a cultural change has been developed; a shift from word to image.
The psychological importance of the image was, directly or indirectly, noticed by several approaches: Freud, Jung, Schilder, Machover, Buch, Watzlawick… yet has not been took completely in all its richness.
The neurological studies on brain hemispheres activity support a re-valuation of the role of the right hemisphere and therefore of images.
The psychodramatic methodology created by Moreno, which introduced into the psychotherapy two main factors: action (left hemisphere) and space (right hemisphere), favors the integration of the activity in both parts of the brain. The technique of psychodramatic image goes a step beyond in combining specifically the use of images (right hemisphere) and action-verbal (left hemi-sphere) aspects.
Graciela Moyano Rojas-Bermudez