The Neverending Story: Defeating Our Monsters Through Psychodynamic Therapy

Defeating our Monsters Through Psychodynamic Therapy

Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story is a classic film about an evil force known as the Nothing. A young fighter, Atreyu is thrown into a perilous journey through the imaginative world known as Fantastica and fights through sickness and death. The Nothing comes to symbolize all that is wrong about society created by humans. The resolution comes when the young boy destroys the Nothing which brings peace and happiness back into the world. While monsters in many stories, such as this, are often used for entertainment, many of these scary beings are designed to assist young readers in navigating complex real-life situations and confronting challenging emotions. What The Neverending Story

Such relationships are not only with family members, but with coworkers, friends, members of the community, and amongst members of various cultures. In Current Approaches in Drama Therapy, it is noted that “historical trauma can also have negative effects on cultural and national identity and self-esteem. Human beings are tribal in nature and have a need to feel good about the tribe to which they belong” (Johnson, et al., p. 145). There is no doubt that it is true that people want to feel a scene of safety. If the people around the subject are members of that person’s tribe and are creating monsters in his or her own life, it can lead to many issues, particularly with self-esteem. This is where drama therapy can come in to play because it resolves issues with the “Monsters”. It therefore may be of no surprise that drama therapy was used to help Jews work out their monsters whom they considered to be the Nazis. In many cases during drama therapy the therapist will not force the transference. But sometimes the therapist must take on a role and act out the drama with their client (Johnson, et.al., 78). When a person goes to see the therapist, the therapist cannot initiate role play, it must be initiated by the

Reading about them and drawing them to the surface can further encourage use of therapy rather than hinder progress in such therapy. However, there are varying perspectives as to the effectiveness of dramatizing such monsters in therapy. Most obviously, there are some who believe that the risks may make such an approach useless, while others purport that drama therapy has significant implications for positive