Talia Sydney Katz

TALIA KATZ, then a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, was awarded funding in April 2022 to aid research on “From the Clinic to the Stage: Psychodrama, Violence, and Subjectivity in Israel,” supervised by Dr. Clara Han. This research investigated the practice of psychodrama in Israel, exploring how the ethics and aesthetics of theatre transformed clinical thought on trauma and the self. Over sixteen months of field and archival research across Israel, the grantee conducted participant observation of adult and child community theatre groups led by a psychodrama therapist as well as oral histories and semi-structured interviews. In complement, she interviewed psychodrama and drama therapy students and practioners. Through the aforementioned methods, the grantee tracked howaesthetic techniques produced knowledge of the subjective experience of violence and attended to how role play worked on the self and the self’s relations to others across the movements between the stage and everyday life. In order to determine how clinical debates on healing and repair shifted in relation to different forms of violence, the grantee conducted archival research in medical libraries across Israel. The research contributed to anthropological scholarship on trauma by constituting psychodramatic role-play as its object, thus offering novel conceptual resources for understanding how violence is absorbed into processes of self-making. The dissertation culminating from this research will contribute to scholarship on ritual and performance, the history of psychiatry, everyday life, and intimacies in contexts of religious difference.