Case study of dramatherapy for a bulmina nervosa patient

폭식증 환자의 연극치료 사례

This paper describes dramatherapy with a bulmina nervosa patient. She was in her early 20s and has been under the various psychotherapies for cure of deep depression since 2005. We had 24 sessions and 3 persons - the patient, the therapist, and the assist-therapist- participated in dramatherapy. I found there's a big collision between her important roles in the course of initial interview and diagnosis. Those roles are 'a good daughter of mom' and 'an independent adult'. Therefore I defined her bulmina nervosa as 'an symbolic behavior repeats compulsively the failure of separation from her mother.' And I set the general goals, the separation from her mother, the awareness and expression of negative emotions, and the diminuation of overeating and vomiting. To attain these object, we had many different dramatic experiences in dramatherapy. We made a self-portrait, the mask of bulmina nervosa, family sculpture, figure work, the past I and the present I, psychodramatic scene and several stories. In order to objective assessment, I used behavioral observation and 6PSM(6 Pieces Story Making) analysis. First of all the most noticeable change was a rapid decrease in over-eating and vomiting. Before the dramatherapy she had overeaten 30 times per week. At the closure it has fallen off to 1 time per week. Another behavioral changes were shift of outward appearance, not going church, working for living, and having a date with only one. She made 3 stories on 1th session, 13th session, and 23th session. And I comparatively analysed those stories with both qualitative and quantitative method. For qualitative analysis, I classified 5 structures according to the substantial similrarity. On protagonist structure, there's no difference. Three protagonists are dead things. The type of task structure is changed from an escape, a traveling, to metamorphosis. The type of obstruction structure is changed from the protagonist to an outside object. The type of closure structure is changed from an exaggerated happy ending, sad ending to probable happy ending. To quantitify the aspects of transformation, I developed an assesment tool using likert scale. It is composed of 4 sub-categories-reality testing, imagination, ego-strength, optimism problem-solving. In reality testing category, a shift of score was 9-11-15, imagination 2-5-5, ego strength 3-2-2, optimism 6-3-7, and total score 20-21-29. This change of score reflects the growth of problem solving capacity. Viewed in this light, dramatherapy with this girl was successful on the whole. The thing had significant effect on it was psycho-dynamic approach focused on separation from her mother and defence mechanism to avoid negative emotion. And assessment method used in this case will be full of suggestions to researches to come.