SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Beat the Prosecution, presented by Northern Virginia criminal defense and DUI lawyer Jonathan Katz, where we are here to regularly present you information and ideas for beating your prosecution as best as possible. Nothing on any of our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or for individuals who have paid for a consultation. And now for your host, John Katz.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Hello, everybody. This is John Katz, a Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer here in Fairfax, Northern Virginia. I am beyond excited that I have two amazing guests today. We have Jonathan Moreno. He's an expert in psychodrama. His dad, Jail Moreno, founded and started psychodrama. And back for a return visit is Christopher Floor, the first person I've ever interviewed outside of my law firm over a year ago on this podcast. Who was here with whom at the time? Don Clarkson, one of the students of JL Moreno, who also was a student and or collaborator with Jonathan Moreno. Jonathan, of course, has a great first name. I go by John. He goes by Jonathan. Jonathan Moreno, please introduce yourself.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Well, thanks first of all to you, John, for having me on the podcast. And it's great to also be on with Chris. So meeting you both for the first time in cyberspace. I am an emeritus professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm a philosopher by training. I've been in medical education since really since 1979 when I arrived at George Washington University. And since then have been kicked out of a bunch of medical schools trying to make themselves more respectable in my absence. Most recently, about 18 years at Penn. And I I continue to resist the R word. So I am not retired. I am as the the as the University of Pennsylvania lawyers say, I am severed. I am severed. Isn't that scary? I'm severed from the University of Pennsylvania. But uh continue to write and give talks and be on podcasts like this one, which will be a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Okay, and Christopher Floor, before he introduces himself, you met him if you've been listening to this podcast since early last year, early last year. You've heard me talk about him a lot. He's a great friend. I've known him since 1999. Every uh once a month, this is not open to prosecutors. This is not open to people on the dark side. Every month he gathers at his office uh hybrid to uh choose one lawyer's case and help bring it closer to quantum leaps towards victory. He went all the way with me, Chris, to visit a murder defendant who I couldn't get out on bond. Uh he drove all the way out there to meet with this man with me on. Now I'm not encouraging other people to think they can get away with this with Chris, but he is a very important person in my life. Chris, what do you have to say to everybody?

SPEAKER_03 3:27

Well, I'm glad to be back on here. I'm honored and I'm truly honored to be able to sit in and participate uh with Jonathan's interview. Um, his dad and the work that they've both done has been life-changing for me. Um, and I continue to benefit from my work with psychodrama and uh reenactment when we don't have a psychodramatist uh working with us. Um I am a former public defender from Brooklyn, New York. Uh grew up there on the lovely Long Island, and uh I have been a Marylander for over 27 years now. Um, and I run a small um uh solo practice currently. I'm very, very fortunate to have a brand new team member of Jaina Peterson, who's a recent UB law grad and uh who's awaiting her bar results. Um that's exciting for me. And I primarily practice criminal defense. Um, I focus a good bit of my work on the mentally ill, um, folks with disabilities, autism, and uh drug and alcohol addiction. But very, very glad to be back. And you are an important person in my life. Um, and it's weird for us to go this long without you saying Christopher Floorman at one point. So I'm feeling a little bit off.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Well, you didn't call me Katzman.

SPEAKER_03 4:52

I will call you Katzman right now. Okay, well anyway, but this is about Jonathan today.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

So yes, before we go to Jonathan Moreno, uh, Christopher Floorman, what I do want to tell everyone is Chris has this great combination of being a badass who doesn't pull punches, but he comes across as such this nice guy. And uh, you know, we we have this uh New York area background. I grew up in uh in southern Connecticut near New York, and he grew up wherever I was uh near New York, but he he seems to have this more polished approach to it than me. And so sometimes in a tense situation, if I say, is it maybe not a good idea to say what I'm about to say to really give my uh true feelings to somebody, I might say, What would Chris Floyd say or do with that? Jonathan Moreno, what is psychodrama? How was it developed? Who developed it, and what makes you uh a person who has spent so many decades and thousands of hours of your life with this?

SPEAKER_02 5:55

Well, first I gotta say um we can triangulate about origins because I grew up in the Hudson Valley. Uh I went to Hofstra, so Chris knows the culture of Long Island, and uh I worked at Downstate Medical School in Brook in Flatbush, um, which uh speaking of Brooklyn, um many of my conversations uh at my former employer, SUNY Health Science Center at Brooklyn, otherwise known as Downstate, started with my physician colleagues yelling at me about something. Uh this is a not an unusual way for a conversation to start in Brooklyn. Uh we we usually became friends. So uh, John, um I'm gonna to your last of the several questions. Uh I I was an accident of birth. Uh I did not plan to be uh a resident of a mental hospital. Um, you know, the pediatricians say choose your parents wisely. So uh I apparently chose two rather colorful people uh to be my parents. Uh my father, as you both well know, and maybe some of your listeners and viewers know, uh, was a graduate of the University of Vienna Medical School in 1917. His diploma was signed by Franz Josef, not long before he was chased out. Uh and um uh therefore I'm not 115 years old, I'm getting there. Uh, but I was I was born in 1952, you do the bath, when my father was 63. Uh now you may ask how old was my mother? She was only 60. I'm I'm kidding. Uh she was 28 years younger. Uh they met around 1941. He had been in this country since 1925. He developed psychodrama in Vienna. Apparently, you didn't have to know much or learn much in medical school in those days because he did a lot of things in Vienna other than studying medicine. Um for example, in 1914 and 1915, he was a medic at a refugee camp for the Austro-Hungarian army, actually at two refugee camps. Uh he was they pulled him out of medical school for that purpose. So, how many people can say that they, you know, had a relative who was in the Austro-Hungarian army? Uh he then, after medical school, um, started a journal uh where he published some very famous people in Vienna at that time. You know, there was a lot of intellectuals. Kafka, Franz Kafka was going back and forth between Vienna and Prague, but there are people like you may have heard of, like Martin Buber, who my father was the first person to publish Martin Buber.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Wait, he knew Buber?

SPEAKER_02 8:38

In his journal. Yes, now Buber was older. Um and in fact, he did not start by publishing pieces like I Am Thou, which you educated guys know about. Uh, Martin Buber started by publishing Hasidic folktales, and he published the first ones in my dad's journal uh in the late teens. In fact, I have a letter, a copy of a letter that my father wrote to Buber uh in my office here, my study, uh, specifying that you we are accepting your peace, Mr. Herr Buber. Um we're going to send you a check for the honorarium. Publish it, but you should you should cash it very quickly because of the inflation, which was rampant after World War I in Austria, of course. Uh now there is a professor uh in Vienna uh who believes that actually Martin Buber's I and Thou was inspired by JL by my dad. Uh I'm gonna let that speak for itself. I'm uh I don't know that. Um but I wouldn't be surprised. So, origins of psychodrama. Uh when my dad was growing up in Vienna, probably when he was around 17, 18 years old, getting ready for university, he would hang around the parks, the gardens of Vienna, beautiful city, as you may know, with beautiful gardens. And he noticed that the kids were playing games that involved role playing. You know, mom and dad and and I don't know, cowboys and hidden, which I did, not in fashion anymore, right? Um and he realized that what they were doing was not only exercising their imagination and spontaneity and creativity, they were also working out who they were, kind of through through these roles. Um seven years later or so, eight years later, he started an impromptu theater, he called the Theater of Spontaneity. This is in Vienna. There's now a plaque on the building that you can see where he had his theater, his very small theater. And he invited, played, he challenged people not to play the roles that playwrights wrote for them, but to create their own roles, to play their own roles, to play themselves, as you well know, to play other people in their circle, in their drama. Uh you guys have been uh educated in role-playing with your clients, and perhaps with the opposing counsel, to role play, to reverse roles with the with those in the drama of the of the legal setting, which is a very dramatic, right? Very dramatic setting. It's a it's a theater in itself, as we know. So um among the people that he worked with and really discovered in his theater of spontaneity around 1920, 1921 in Vienna, was a little uh uh uh a very adorable little young man named that he that my father named. Do you know the answer to this one?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Oh, I'm embarrassed.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

Peter Lurrie. Whoa! He it's a matter of record that he discovered Peter Lorrie, whose name was Ladislaw Lowenstein, and he said that will not fit on a theater marquee. Uh I can tell you more about the young Peter Lorrie, if you like, but you know, he took this creepy character that he developed in my father's theater of spontaneity into Fritz Long's famous film M. And Casablanca. I mean, anybody who's seen Casablanca, which I I was one of the great films ever made, Peter Lorrie is in hardly any of the movie. He steals every scene. Uh so uh that's that's the origins of psychodrama. Now the my the I'm saying a lot of words here, so you forgive me, I'll say one more paragraph, not too long. My father tried to make a go of it in the theater, but he realized, he discovered both in Vienna and in New York that audiences were not accustomed to spontaneity, to spontaneous theater. Audiences are trained with a certain expect set of expectations about the dramatic arc, you know, beginning, a middle, and an end. Spontaneous theater, as you know, is not like that. It's kind of herky-jerky. It can be boring, it can be shocking, it can be thrilling, it can be boring again. Um so he just couldn't make a go of it, but he could, he realized, do well with a psychiatric setting. People with emotional problems, normal people like us, what he called normotics, as well as people with really good psychotic delusions, can express themselves, act out in a controlled setting in ways that can be educational for themselves and other people in the group and cathartic. So, long story short, in 1925 he comes to the US. Lots of reasons he came here. I can talk about if you like. And you know, psychodrama is now a global movement. He died in 1974, and I was nearly 22. Um, my mother took over, as you know. Also, uh really more of a therapist than my father was really a guy, a man of the theater. My mother was really the therapist. Uh and it isn't it's a global effort. It's a it he was really the first person, I'll end here, I think, to challenge psychoanalysis. Uh there's a famous story, might even be true. In 1912 or so, he's attending a dream analysis lecture by Freud, dream interpretation. And afterwards the young, the young men, all men, line up and Freud goes down the row, and he get and he gets to my father and he says, And so your name is Moreno. He says, Oh Moreno, what are you doing? And supposedly my father said, Professor Moreno, I begin Professor Freud, I begin where you leave off. What do you mean? He said, Well, you destroy people's dreams by analyzing them. I give them the courage to dream again.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 15:01

I wish you luck, he said. So on you guys now. Come on, Chris. Give me something.

SPEAKER_03 15:17

I I'm curious growing up in uh the family, with both your mom and your dad being so, you know, uh, this was such a dedication, it sounded like for them. Did did they use that in parenting? Did you use that in conflict resolution within the family? That that just kind of sparked into my head as I was thinking about it.

SPEAKER_02 15:40

You know, they did. Um my mother tells a story, and I sort of vaguely remember this when I was maybe five or six years old and I wasn't eating my dinner, and uh she said, uh Jonathan might mean a dinner. Well, I'm not really not hungry tonight, you know, maybe later. Mom. And uh she said, Well, let's reverse rules. And so I went to sit in her chair at the dining room table, and she sat in mine, and and as uh uh as Zirka, I my mother, her name is Zirka, uh I said, You know, Jonathan, you don't need to eat dinner. So I exploited that role reversal. Um we did a little we did some of that. Uh they did some of that. People ask me if I did it with my own kids. I I have to say I didn't. Uh wasn't exactly my thing. My parents really died working. I mean, I I quite literally uh on their deathbeds. Uh I don't know anybody else exactly like that. Uh and now that I'm sort of transitioned from being a full-time professor to being uh, as my stockbroker says, a full-time investor. Uh I I'm sh I'm struck by their total identification with their work. I don't really know anybody else like that.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Okay, so did your father what year did your father come uh over here?

SPEAKER_02 17:20

He came in 1925.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

1925, so that's before he knew who Hitler was.

SPEAKER_02 17:26

So he claimed, and I again, you know, we can't fact-check this, but as my one of my journalist friends says, that this story is too good to fact-check. Um, he claims that when he took his impromptu theater group, his theater spontaneity group to Munich, that he did see Hitler giving a uh a rally, you know, because Munich was Hitler's favorite town. It's where he tried to lead his famous Beer Hall putsch that led him in prison, in Lenzberg prison for a while. And he said that he recognized him, he claimed, from a few years before when Hitler was impoverished after World War I and didn't get into art school, which is unfortunate, you know, please we wish he'd have gotten admitted to art school. And he was painting picture postcards for a few pennies in the park. He claims that he recognized him from that, from seeing him in the park, which is entirely possible because we know he was doing that. Um, that he Hitler was doing that. So uh you know, this was in a very fraught time um in in that part of the world. He also claims that he ran into Trotsky, who was in V, in fact, in Vienna, as he was in New York. Um so you know, Freud, Trotsky, Hitler, who else who else can you run across in Vienna in the late 19 teens and early 1920s?

SPEAKER_01 18:57

So what made your father decide to leave uh Austria, and uh where was it that he uh he and your mom uh started psychodrama, and where did they and you take it from there?

SPEAKER_02 19:11

Well, he came in 1925 to New York. He was 36 years old, so he wasn't a kid. He he had his medical degree, but it was his younger brother who was the business head, William. Uh William helped him uh with his visa. I believe that they they went to Montreal to bribe a State Department official at the consulate to get an extended visa. This is how things were done. Uh in fact, a few years later, a woman married him so that he could become a citizen. This is how things were done. We're talking a lot about immigration these days, right? People forget it wasn't always so regular. Um, it was not good to be coming from that part of Europe in 1925. He couldn't have known that. In 1924, Congress passed a very restrictive immigration law to prevent people from uh southern Eastern Europe from coming to the US. Uh it was a time of eugenics, and the thought was that these these Southern and Eastern people, these Italians, these Jews, uh would pollute uh the American race. I'm not I'm not exaggerating here. I teach this stuff, so um, this is the way people spoke. Also, the the the new uh Austrian Republic had no clout, no power. And he was all it was confusing because he was also not an Austrian citizen. He was Romanian, he had been born in Romania, so he was he was in a tough spot. Um but you know, through these other informal means he was able to stay in the US. But why did he come here is the question, John. That's complicated. Some of his friends and colleagues were going to Palestine to create the new to the new settlement uh for Jews. Some of them, I think, were going to Russia. Russia seemed like a place of the future. There had been the right the Bolshevik Revolution, a lot of optimism in the early days uh about the future of Russia. Um he chose to come to the US uh partly because he had a business opportunity. He and his his his Austrian girlfriend's brother had invented an audio recording device they called Radio Film. It was patented in Austria and a company that later was purchased by RCA paid for his boat ticket first class, which he was very proud of, uh to come to New York. Then he discovered when he got here that in order to full to go on with his relationship with the company, and by the way, my father could not screw in a light bulb. It was really his girlfriend's brother who was the inventor. He was a real very clever, like Thomas Edison kind of guy where. Working in a garage, who created this audio system, audio recording system, one of a couple of hundred that were around at that time. My father discovered that to continue that relationship, he would have gone to Aurora, Ohio. Now, my dad had come from Vienna as a very sophisticated guy. He was not going to Ohio. He stayed in New York, developed a medical practice, got on his feet. And then within 10 years, he was a very well-established guy who was kind of famous. Do you know that he uh predicted the outcomes of heavyweight title fights? Do you know that story?

SPEAKER_01 22:39

No, I don't know that. That would be pretty cool.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

So there was an AP journalist who really liked his work. This is the early 1930s. And uh was going through divorce apparently, and my father helped him through his divorce emotionally. And he said, Okay, Moreno, if you're so smart, can you predict the outcome of the Max Bear-Joe Lewis fight that's happening in 1935? Sure. But you have to get me into the training camps. So he got him in and he observed the interactions of the of the fighters, Max Bear and Joe Lewis, with other people. He also noted that Max Bear had just started, had been in a film with Myrna Loy and had started an affair with Myrna Loy. And my father published this in the newspapers that Joe that Max Baer was distracted, that he wasn't focused, and his training camp kind of knew that. Joe Lewis, on the other hand, was a straight-ahead fighter. Nothing would stop Joe Lewis. And you could see that he was a leader in his camp. He predicted that Joe Lewis would win. And he did. 1935. I'm not making this up. You can look it up. He then became very popular with sports writers, and he was asked repeatedly to do this. So he did a number of fights. He predicted a number of fights for like the Brooklyn Eagle, for those old newspapers. He was syndicated. And I think he was the first person to apply psychology in some in some loose way to sports. And I'll bet my father was not a gambler. I'll bet some people made money. After they saw that this this psychiatrist of all people was an accurate predictor of heavyweight fights, I'm sure people made some money on him.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

That's wild.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

And uh at what point uh did he start doing the psychodrama? And I guess that was well before you were born.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

Oh, yeah. I mean, I mentioned his impromptu theater in Vienna. In 1931, he also tried that at Carnegie Hall. He worked with a number of actors in what was then called the group theater. Um some of them might be um familiar to you. One of them was a guy named John Garfield. Um there were a lot of really famous actors, and there were all the whole Broadway was very intimate in those days. And as you know, the movie industry had not yet fully moved to LA. It mostly had, but not completely. So there were a lot of actors around, and he was working with actors to help to train them for their roles. Uh and then he one day he tried to do a psychodrama at Carnegie Hall, didn't go well. Because the theater critics, again, they didn't get it, you know, didn't get spontaneity. So his he saw that we needed to do is work into psychodrama in psychiatry. So his younger brother helped him by uh at first about 11 acres in Beacon, New York. And he had a famous first, uh he had the mother of a famous actor as his first patient, a very wealthy woman named uh his his patient was Franchetone, who you probably don't know who Franchetone was, but if you Google him, you'll see him in a lot of movies. Uh and he was the king of Broadway. His wife at the time was somebody you have heard of, named Joan Crawford.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Joan Crawford was the Queen of Hollywood, he was the king of Broadway. No marriage wasn't going well. Uh, and my father did marriage counseling with them, which was he wrote about it in the newspapers. Probably the first famous marriage counseling in psychodrama. Didn't work out so well. Uh apparently she walked in on him in flagrante with somebody on backstage one day, and that was the end of that marriage. Uh, but it was psychodrama in a psychodrama in a marriage. But but before that, he had got a letter from a very powerful guy named uh Mr. Tone in uh in upstate New York, whose wife was having alcohol problems. And Gertrude Franchette Tone. So my father said, I'm happy to see her. My father was already getting famous by then. I'm happy to see your wife and send her to me here in Beacon, New York. So Bertrud comes in holding his book, his one of his first big book called Who Shall Survive? And she's obviously a very intelligent woman. So he agrees to take her on as his student. Now remember, Mr. Tone, her husband, the father of Franchot, the actor, had wanted Gertrude to go to my father to be his patient because she had an alcohol problem. I I have a feeling that my father ended up double dipping. That Mr. Tone was paying her him to be the therapist for his wife, and Mrs. Tone was paying him to be her teacher. So we can argue about that. Uh this is important though, because when he had this land, 11 acres and beacon and a big building, he didn't have a psychodrama theater. And she donated the funds to build a psychodrama theater, the first one in the world. So then he started uh receiving mental patients, which he he had a he had 30 years of uh receiving mental patients from the late 30s to the late 60s, with I can tell you about his favorites, people who were had wonderful psychotic delusions that were terrific for psychodrama. Hitler's you know, Jesus figures. Uh I can talk more about one of my favorites if you like later on. Uh and it was a center for training people like you, uh, lawyers, but also psychonauts, people who were just exploring questions about their lives, uh professors, physicians, clergy. Uh you know, very few psychiatrists were willing to work seriously with people who believed in God because they were Freudian. And according to Freud, these faith is is neurotic. But my father was himself a God player, and so he was very happy to have these people play God in psychodrama.

SPEAKER_01 29:27

Chris.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

Yes, I'm I'm uh fascinated here, and uh and I I don't want to wait. So when you said and threw out the line to us, do you want to hear what one of his favorite patients was? Um I'm I'm all in.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

This is a great story. Okay. I well, I gotta say, you're not supposed to say that before you tell a story, right? But I think you're gonna like this story. So I I always, you know, I we we we were in a separate building, we had 20 acres ultimately in Beacon. Um, and uh it's gone now, basically. I mean, it's all been changed, there's buildings there, homes there now. Uh but I would I saw the patients, and it was hard to keep a little boy away from the hospital, which was like a five-minute walk down the dirt road from our house. So I knew who when the patients were coming and going, I knew who they were. And they had they had recently admitted a young man. And so I was being driven home from school, which is sort of unusual, up one of the hills on our place, and I saw this young man who I knew that was a new patient, and I waved at him. I think I was eight or nine years old, and I noticed something different. He was standing outside on a beautiful hill overlooking the property, with a kind of a a view about a mile away, a mile and a half away of Hudson Hudson River through the trees. And uh I noticed that he had very dark hair, black hair, and I noticed also that he had black hair everywhere. And when I say everywhere, I mean I had never seen that before. So I waved and then I saw that he was nude, and it was a beautiful day in the 70s, and uh there was nobody else around, you know. So years later, when I asked my mother about this, he said yes, he was Jesus, and Jesus had to be nude because Jesus was pure. So all right. Now, that's only the first part of the story. It gets better. Between our property uh was a stand of tre with the a and the next property was a stand of trees, not a not a wraith, but some maybe, I don't know, twenty yards of worth of trees. And Jesus, this young man, would walk around in the nude. So next door to us at that time there was an ovitiate, a convent, where young nuns would have to go to, you know, prove themselves worthy of the discipline. So you you you know where this is going? It's going somewhere fun. My mother gets a call from the abbess one day. She says, Mrs. Moreno, some of the young women are very disturbed by this young man who's walking around unclothed. And my mother now remember, he's Jesus. Right? So my mother says, Well, they don't have to look.

SPEAKER_03 32:56

Thank you for that, Jonathan. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

Well, somewhere along the road, uh, Don Clarkson from the Trial Oras College met your father in the early 60s, met you, Jerry Spence, who was uh had the trial or as college starting his ranch, swore by the uh swore by psychodrama, which is a big part of the trial or as college. What is the reason why I have not heard about you being involved with the trial or as college? What was your involvement with Don Clarkson?

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Well, with Don, I mean I was a kid. I would think I was 12, 13 when Don, you know, who's about 10 years older, I think, than I am. Uh, he shows up in Beacon uh with a number of other students uh uh at the at the behest of uh uh a great therapist, the late Jim Ennis of St. Elizabeth Hospital here in Washington. Um so Don was one of uh Jim Ennis's favorites, and he he comes to Beacon and he's he spent uh some time in Beacon, I don't remember how much. I was doing my thing. I was a kid, you know, I was junior high school and then high school, so I wasn't paying all that much attention, but I was I became very fond of Don right away. I will also say, by the way, there were very few people of color in the psychiatry world at that time, in the psychotherapy world. Uh and so that was you know, that was different. Uh and I'm sure it was not so easy for Don. First of all, it was kind of a strange environment, right, with a lot of weird people doing psychodrama and mental patients. And you can tell the patients from the students, frankly. I mean, my my father liked to mix it up. Uh so that was pretty funny, I think, for Don. Um and then I got to know Don better in the mid-1970s when I was pretty much grown up, more or less, in my early 20s. Um, and you never heard about me at me at TLC because I was, I mean, I've been a lifetime professor and I was busy. Uh now, Jerry, I will say, sent one of his books with a very sweet uh inscription in the early 90s. Um, but you know, I I was I was working in medical schools teaching medical ethics, and I wasn't going out to TLC, but I I followed what was going on with great interest. And I must say, uh, watching Jerry uh on YouTube in his presentations, he was one of the few people in the world who has as big a personality as my dad. I would say I'd met a few, maybe on you know, on several fingers of one hand, who as big a personality as my father was. And he was clearly one. And so that he got it was not surprising to me when I saw him do his work, when I saw him give talks.

SPEAKER_01 35:55

So you were invited to be involved with the trial or as college?

SPEAKER_02 35:58

I actually was not in, I was not specifically invited, I gotta say.

unknown 36:02

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

No, no, I was not specifically invited. Would I have gone? I I I probably would have out of curiosity. Also, because Jerry was a famous guy and would have been very interesting to meet him. And I have worked with lawyers on I also am I've done expert witness work. Uh so it would have been really fun to talk to Jerry about that. Um, but uh no, was never actually there.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Before I go, have Chris ask the next question. This one might ruffle some feathers, not yours. What is the quality of uh some of the so-called best psychodramatists out there? And is psychodrama going in the right direction right now in terms of how it's practiced and how it's taught?

SPEAKER_02 36:46

Uh well, the what's important, well, it was a real problem for my dad getting into the 1960s because so many people were doing, as you know, you guys are of a certain age as well, who were doing encounter groups and sensitivity training. There was some crazy stuff going on. And many of these people, especially in out in the Bay Area in San Francisco, were calling what they were doing psychodrama. Uh, and some of what they're doing was really bad. So it developed, I think, in in some quarters, a bad reputation. My father was not a guy who would start like certification programs, but finally in the 1970s, people said we have to have proper training so that we can distinguish the people who are legit from the people who are not. And now we have there is a an American what's called an American Board of Examiners that give certification. So any anybody with the sound of my voice uh or my or the view of my image, if you're interested in psychodrama for uh for psycho for psychotherapy or just to hear about it, uh I or to uh get a some kind of a counselor or advisor, I would make sure that they are certified uh as as a psychodrama practitioner. Those people, I think, are very well qualified. But this was a problem in the 1960s. Um can I add one thing to that? I have just been totally transfixed the last few nights by uh a documentary series about Cynanon. Uh, I if you haven't seen it, urge you to watch it. Complicated story. Chris, have you did you see have you seen it?

SPEAKER_03 38:26

I did, and I was thinking exactly when you mentioned the Bay Area about how just like Jim Jones, things started out in a really good direction, and oh boy, did they just in a bad place.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

So there's Chuck Dietrich was an alcoholic. I'm just going to summarize this for people who aren't filming with Sinanon, who in the late 1950s realized that uh that drug addicts, not necessarily alcoholics, but people here are IV drug users or whatever, that they could benefit from a different, a related but different approach from the 12 steps uh of AA. So he started an organization called Cinnanon, which was a kind of a mashup of different terms that some somebody used. Um and the the core concept, which I'm giving the game away here for those of you who haven't watched the documentary, was something called the game. And the game was essentially an encounter group, you might say. But in the game, in Chuck Diedrich's game, you could say anything to anybody else in the group that you wanted to, as long as it wasn't threatening violence. It became violent, as Chris knows toward the end, but you could say anything you want. The difference between what Diedrich was doing and what, and he definitely was inspired by psychodrama, there's no question. The mistake he made was that, you know, if I'm gonna I'm gonna yell at Chris, John, Chris, you're a schmuck, you know, can't stand you. And then, well, in psychodrama, it's okay, now become Chris. What do you want to say to Jonathan? And how does it, how do you feel about what he said to you, right? So he didn't do the role reversal. So it became a if you just do a a one-way, you know, uh a game, as they called it, that's very destructive. And you could see inevitably, Chris, I'm sure you could see this because you know the TLC, you have the experience, you can see where this was going. And Diedrich, now I will say one other thing, if I might, about Chuck Diedrich, the founder of Cynanon. You know, Lou Yablonsky, who was one of my father's favorite students, and I loved Lou. He was a sociologist and psychodramatist, famous guy. Becomes a hero, by the way, uh, at the end of that fourth episode. Um, Lou was fascinated by Cynanon. He went in to write a book about Cynonon, the first one called The Tunnel Back. It was very sympathetic in the beginning. In 1967, my parents were in a conference in uh in LA. Chuck Diedrich and Louis Blonsky are sitting with a biker, a Hells Angel guy. Chuck was surrounded by Hell's Angels. They were his security force at that time. And my father comes in looking crazily eccentric with my mother, 28 years younger. And the Hells Angels guy says, Look at that crazy guy. And Chuck Diedrich says, That crazy guy is the reason you're you're alive now. Wow. So you know, Cynadon did not have a good end, but it had a good start.

SPEAKER_01 41:38

Chris, you're next.

SPEAKER_03 41:40

Yeah, so um, Jonathan, I was curious. Your your book, Impromptu Man, JL Moreno, and the origins of psychodrama, psychodrama, and counterculture and the social network. Uh, looks like you wrote that around 2014 or it was published then. The process of doing that and going that deep and examining your dad's work and I'm guessing your mom's too. As I said, I I'll confess that I have not had the pleasure yet, but it is definitely going to be in my shelf. Um uh did you learn anything new and did you develop any insights from doing that deep dive that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_02 42:20

That's a good question. So I don't really write about my mom, I will say. She uh was still alive at the time, she wrote her own memoir. Um I was interested in JL, and I called him JL in the book rather than dad, or you know, because I wanted look, I was already approaching the age that he was when I was born. And I did not know him, if you think about it, really for the first 70 years. I mean, I was seven years old when he was 70, right? So you think about your own parents, when did you really get to know them as people or appreciate that they were independent people and get and assess them? So I didn't really know him for the first 70 years of his life, which is really weird, right? Yeah, so I want and I was also approaching uh uh the senior period of my career. How did this guy think about his career? How did he develop, you know, they in the 30s in America they called the lat climb up the ladder, right? The ladder of success. We don't use that term anymore, but that's the way they they talked about it then. How did he climb the ladder? How did he understand what he was doing and get into the culture the way he did? So I I developed, I think, a perspective on him as a guy who was making his way in a new in a new land, in a new world. And before, so he came in 25, the big influx of Europeans, European intellectuals and scholars and scientists was 10 years later, 10, 15 years later. So he was early. He was before the big wave. And he was very exotic. You can imagine, you know, with the accent. In America in the 1930s, there weren't too many people like that. So I I'm sure he attracted a lot of attention because of his very uh theatrical manner and his accent. And you know, he was a psychiatrist, and it must have been quite striking. So I I think the short answer I should give you is I I I tried to see him in the book as somebody who was making his way in America in the middle of the 20th century. And one of the ways he did that was to boxing. I mean, he became a boxing fan and you know, and and a an observer of the dynamic of people in the ring. So yeah, I mean uh I will share with you that uh while I was writing the book, uh you may remember that the Republican Convention in 1912, in 1912, showing my age, in in in 2012, Clint Eastwood took the stage with an empty chair. And I actually I said, Oh my god, this is unbelievable. So I went to bed. I this is totally true. And I after about 10 minutes, I said, I I've got to write something. And I wrote something, and that night I sent it to the New York Times. And the next morning, typos and all, they accepted it. Shocked. And it's it's on my wall over here. They gave it the title. Uh, I'm looking at it now, what the chair could have told Clint. Because, you know, he's yelling at Obama in the empty chair, but he's not reversing roles with Obama. Yes, from his point of view. So, New York Times, uh, and I got a lot of mail, 99% of it, very, very nice. And one woman wrote to me and the editor of the Times this is the nicest thing that anybody's ever said to me, I think about a piece of writing. This reminds me why I subscribe to the New York Times. God bless him. Wow, yeah. But I will say, where did Clint Eastwood get that idea? He he got it from psychodrama, not directly, but people like Woody Allen, Alan Alda, um, what's it, Don Knotts? Remember him? Sure. Bay Berry, the deputy.

SPEAKER_01 46:27

I don't think they had uh psychodrama on the Andy Griffith show, though.

SPEAKER_02 46:32

No, but they learned how to play roles spontaneously. They went to my my father's psychodrama in in New York. They all did in the early 60s, yeah. Woody Allen, as a matter of record, I mean, a former editor of The Village Voice wrote about Woody Allen uh going to psychodrama. Uh and my mother remembered him, very annoyed with him because he he wasn't taking it seriously at an emotional level. He was he was in clearly developing his little his you know his role uh not really being part of the psychodrama, playing himself.

SPEAKER_01 47:07

Wow. The name of this show is Beat the Prosecution, Jonathan. To what extent have you worked with lawyers and what has been your involvement in uh helping patients if you have have that licensing or whatever you call it, tell patients uh or whoever else uh uh go through psychodrama and to and of course you've taught psychodrama, and to what extent have you been doing that?

SPEAKER_02 47:32

So I have not taught psychodrama or led groups since I was in my mid-30s. Uh I decided it wasn't for me, no problem with it, but it wasn't that that's that lifestyle, that role, that career wasn't for me. Uh I I said earlier, you know, in the beginning, right, of the show, uh, I came through the birth canal. Not you know, I I didn't uh I wasn't I didn't volunteer for this, as far as I know. Maybe in some Buddhist sense I did, right? Uh that's a different question. Um right, exactly. Go, go, John. Buddhism's really the only way, right, ultimately. Um, so uh but uh I have noticed how it has penetrated the culture because of I from this perspective, including medical education. I mean, in medical education, there is role-playing with patients, with people who are playing the roles of patients, um, to sensitize them to the medical setting and to what they will be doing as doctors. Uh I have been I have been uh an expert on, I've been deposed more than 40 times. Uh I've had some fascinating cases. Uh I will say that what really interests me, and some of them have come through your colleagues, the people who've gone through the Trial Lawyers College. What's sort of fascinating to me about you guys is the different ways that lawyers prepare their experts. It's very, it can be very different. The way that the management of expert witnesses is another topic uh I find quite fascinating. Uh, there are some people who come who come at me with their theory of the case, right? Which I resist because I want to develop my own view. Uh and but and then there are some people who are kind of pretty straightforward about it. There's this, there's that, you know, we haven't finished our discovery yet, and so forth. So I find I find the role of the expert uh in itself quite fascinating. Some of you guys will prepare experts better than others, as you probably know. Sometimes the great lawyer will not do well uh in a deposition against an expert because they're not prepared. Preparation is absolutely key. So that's been my uh experience. And I I have done some lots of consent, informed consent cases, cases in involving clinical trials, and then some other cases where my my wife, who by the way is a lawyer, uh uh has said to me, What do they need you to say that a doctor shouldn't have sex with his patients? I don't understand why you're being paid for this because this lawyer in North Carolina says that you know, according to their rules, they need an expert to say that.

SPEAKER_03 50:24

So Jonathan, if I could jump in just to say, since you're talking about that, knowing who John's audience is, uh, you know, for beat the prosecution, that what kind of things could you share with us that the good lawyers did to help you be a better expert? Because there's lots of us that have to do just that.

SPEAKER_02 50:44

Uh I I'm gonna say, Chris, time for preparation. Don't put the expert in a position where there's something that comes up in the deposition they don't know about. I have had that experience. I had a a case maybe 12, 15 years ago, where a lawyer threw a lot of stuff at me at the last minute. I mean, in those days, I had two suitcases of documents that I rolled in. Uh and as soon as the lawyer for the other side, who was a very nice fellow, by the way, uh looked at those suitcases full of documents, he asked me, how Professor Moreno, how long have you had those documents? And I said, about three days. That was the worst. Uh the lawyer was a very senior guy, but he was too busy, and who knows what else he was working on. So don't let me be surprised, you know. Don't give give me everything you've got. Uh I I actually insist on that. And I think that's the key. Thank you. As an expert.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

While we have about six minutes left, to what extent have you worked with uh patients or subjects yourself to to help them out using psychodrama?

SPEAKER_02 52:05

So um I have I have been very hesitant, even when I was really doing psychodrama, John, to uh present myself as a therapist because I'm not a psychologist, uh of no clinical background per se. Um what I did was I worked with trainers, and I felt very comfortable doing that, training the trainers, because I knew all the techniques so well, and I knew um variations on themes that I had seen in psychodrama since I was a kid. I mean, I there were some situations, I will say, this is sort of to Chris's question before, that I should not have been in growing up. Uh I'm gonna tell you one last story. When I was about 12 years old, I was somehow in a psychodrama, in the psychodrama theater, with some patients and some students. And there was a young, uh, a woman, maybe in her 40s, late 40s, 50, who was playing herself and and she needed, she was in a bar. She wanted to talk about a situation she'd been in in a bar, not long before that. And she chose me to be a man uh sitting next to her in the bar. Um, and I was about, again, I was about 12 years old, and uh we reversed roles, and as the man sitting in the bar, uh the director said to her, sitting now as the man in her in the bar, uh, what do you about what do you think about this lady? And and playing this man, she looked at me and said, I'd like to, you can fill in the blank, her. That's true. True story. And I remember she had a very pixie-ish kind of hairdo and you know, nice looking lady. And I sort of knew what she was talking about, but I sort of didn't. So I used a line that she had given me when I was in the role of the man. I said, uh, I'm in I'm in accounting. What do you do? So fortunately, whoever was directing the psychodrama at that moment said, I think we should get another person to play that guy's role. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:26

Well, how about your input on this then, Jonathan? Uh, sometimes we lawyers, without a psychodrama expert, at least without a mental health expert, will do uh role-playing and reverse role-playing with our clients, whether we call it scene reenactment to play it safe, where do you think we should draw the line to make sure that our uh clients not then going home afterwards and going into an emotional tail spin?

SPEAKER_02 54:51

Super important question. I think there's a difference between go working at the psychological level in an individual for an individual individual situation, and working at a role level. So when you're in a role, play mom, play dad, you know, play the boss, play the employee, play the play the lawyer uh uh for one side, play the lawyer for the other side, play the judge, play the witness. Um, keep it at a social it at a at a sociological level, not at an individualized level where you're getting into their own dynamics, their their personal deepest psychological dynamics. You may that may be hard to avoid. I'm gonna grant you that, John. But I think you have to be very careful to draw the line. You know, you're their counselor in a legal sense, you're not their therapist. Uh, and I I think that's really critical. Don't don't take responsibility for their deepest personal problems. You're trying, you're kind of work, you're trying to help them work through uh what might be a very traumatic situation, obviously, right? Nobody goes to nobody goes to you because everything's going well. Right? Uh, and I appreciate that. But somehow you have to, I think, it's going to be individualized, draw the line between becoming their therapist and being their counselor and advisor at a in terms of the law. And their presentation in the in the court, of course.

SPEAKER_01 56:20

As we're just around four, I want to connect this into uh Chris Flora in his own way, as one of these people who has taken uh psychodrama to a great level to really um help out himself and so many of our colleagues in uh getting closer to the win. Uh, Chris, what do you think about that? And what else do you want to ask Jonathan? You're gonna have the last question of him.

SPEAKER_03 56:45

Well, thanks. Um, you know, it was at Don's uh encouragement, and John was the forefront. He was the very first leader of the local groups when he was still practicing out of Maryland, and we got so much out of that. Our classmates was a very small group. Uh, we limited it to only people at that time that were trialers college grads, and it was hard to get momentum. We're all busy and so forth. And uh I uh become closer to Don through that group. I didn't really work with him much out in '99. We were at the same place for a month, and I probably saw him a half a dozen times. Um, but uh John uh, you know, here has been an important part of my uh you know, group. We meet every second Saturday at my office. And sometimes we have a psychodramatist, you know, that's leading, sometimes we don't, but it's been really helpful to be in the role of a director, which is a totally different skill. Um, and I just have to say I'm so humbled and grateful to be in this conversation today because you know, I am in debt to your dad. Um, and and I'm glad that you, you know, wrote the book because lots of people, when both John and I introduced this concept, we just get a shrug, you know, shoulder shrug, like, what? Um, you know, and uh I say, if you want to see a version of it, watch Billy Jack. There's the only movie that has a scene in it uh that that you can hear the word psychodrama.

SPEAKER_02 58:21

He he uses the word psychodrama. I almost fell off my chair. When did that come out in 1968 or 69?

SPEAKER_03 58:27

Early 70s. Yeah, early 70s, yeah. Early 70s, yep. I've got the poster up on my wall. Um, but uh you know, John has got a good since he gave me the last question. Uh I'm gonna copy from him that usually he ends this podcast with is there anything that we didn't get to ask you that you would like to share with the group or something that since we're largely a group of lawyers listening to this podcast, but some non, um, and you've worked with a bunch of us. Is there anything that you would like to share with us before we close out?

SPEAKER_02 58:58

Well, I would I would say if you've got somebody like Don Clarkson running a group, you've got a great psych therapist. That's different from you working with a with a client uh in you know in a in a typical legal setting. And when you've got a bunch of people getting together in your groups who are prepared for what they're going to experience, which is a true psychological exploration through psychodrama, and you've got Don Clarkson, you're in great shape. So I would I would say one needs to distinguish, you know, your your legal client doesn't, you don't want that person to go home after their and think that you're their therapist. And that's that's that's what I mean to say, not to discourage people from using psychodrama in their preparation for the legal work when you've got something like Don Clarkson and you and everybody understand what the situation is. I think that's that's that's where I would distinguish between being the counselor, being the therapist, and being the colleague with a great therapist like Don. Thank you. Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 59:59

And what is your last word, Chris?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:02

Oh, I I have none. Just gratitude. Just gratitude. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:06

This is Chris, I want I want to hear from you after you read the book.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:10

Absolutely. No, no, I have your email address now, thanks to John's office. So I'm gonna get that going quick. And I do I I would love to follow up with you. Thank you for that.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:19

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:21

Before I sign off, um, you know, I think most all of us have heard about uh jail moreno and our psychology classes in high school, in college, and and for those of you who are not mental uh health professionals who don't know anything about psychodrama other than what you've heard about today, uh read Jonathan's book, Absolutely Essential, for instance. And for those mental health professionals of you, uh among you, where I ask you, uh, what do you think about psychodrama? And and you give me a blank stare that you've heard about it. Learn more about it, please. And that book is absolutely essential, right, Jonathan?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

The the new book, thank you for mentioning John, is is about uh a whole other topic, which is the the international situation, the rules-based order for the last 80 years since World War II that's prevented World War III, that is now undergoing drastic change, and a perspective on what's going on globally, published by MIT Press. Um, so that's my that's my latest preoccupation, is that that little book.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:28

Do you have a book about psychodrama?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:30

The book is called Impromptu Man, Chris mentioned.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:32

That's the one, Impromptu Man.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:34

That's the one about uh my dad, my attempt to reconstruct his career.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:38

And finally, do you have a URL, a website?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:42

Uh, you know, I don't at the moment. Um, but you can go to the pen pen website. I'm still on the pen, medical ethics and health policy website. Uh, or you can just write to me. Um, you know, if you're if you wanna if somebody wants to get my email address, they could write to you, John, perhaps.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:01

John at Beatheprosecution.com. Yes. Well, uh, like with so many of my amazing guests, I don't want to stop, but I told you both I'd finish at four, and we're a little past them. Uh, you have heard from Jonathan Moreno uh what a gift he has given us. You have heard from uh Christopher Floor, who is a true griff gift, not only to his colleagues, but to mankind, and I don't exaggerate there. This is John Katza Beat the Prosecution. I'm a criminal defense and DUI defense lawyer in Northern Virginia. I thank these two men so much. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:37

Thank you for listening to this week's episode from Beat the Prosecution. This is a regular podcast giving people a leg up against police investigations and prosecutions. Nothing discussed on our media sources, such as our podcast or website, is legal advice. John Katz only provides legal advice to current clients or to individuals who have paid for a consultation. We welcome you contacting us via email at info at beat the prosecution.com by calling our office at 703 383 1100 or texting us at 571 406 7268.