Sign-In
Cart
Psychodrama and Civilization
Paperback
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN13: 9798180879905
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 10 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jun 10 2026
Pages: 318
Weight: 0.94
Height: 0.67 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Why does every prosperous society keep manufacturing the same private griefs? The names change with the decade, but the shape does not: addiction that slides from one substance to the next without ever loosening its grip; anxiety that arrives without an enemy; the slow erosion of the bonds that were supposed to hold a life together; the quiet exhaustion of the generous, who keep a community alive until they themselves go dark. We treat each of these as a separate misfortune with a separate cure. This book argues that they are not separate at all. They are the symptoms of one missing thing.
Every workable civilization once gave its members a stage to step onto for an hour: a recurring, low-stakes space in which a person could safely try out a different self and walk back into ordinary life enlarged rather than ruined. Ritual offered it. Festival offered it. The theater offered it. We have spent a century multiplying the roles a human being must play for keeps while quietly demolishing the rehearsal room. The result is a hunger that never goes away and never finds its proper food.
Following a single line of argument from the deficit, through the structural law that governs what an unmet hunger does to a person, to a concrete and remarkably old remedy, this book reintroduces a forgotten technology of the soul. It begins on an empty Viennese stage in 1921 and ends with a practical proposal for the present: a distributed network of small dramatic gatherings, embedded in the communities we already have, run in turn by ordinary people, designed from the first principle to resist the very capture it is meant to heal. It is a book about how we break, why we break in exactly these two ways, and how a society might remember the difference between living and merely performing.
Written for the intelligent reader who has never needed an equation to be moved by an idea, it asks the oldest question in a new key: not who are you, but who might you safely become, and where on earth are you allowed to practice.
Keywords: psychodrama, civilization, addiction, self, community, play, resilience
Following a single line of argument from the deficit, through the structural law that governs what an unmet hunger does to a person, to a concrete and remarkably old remedy, this book reintroduces a forgotten technology of the soul. It begins on an empty Viennese stage in 1921 and ends with a practical proposal for the present: a distributed network of small dramatic gatherings, embedded in the communities we already have, run in turn by ordinary people, designed from the first principle to resist the very capture it is meant to heal. It is a book about how we break, why we break in exactly these two ways, and how a society might remember the difference between living and merely performing.
Written for the intelligent reader who has never needed an equation to be moved by an idea, it asks the oldest question in a new key: not who are you, but who might you safely become, and where on earth are you allowed to practice.
Keywords: psychodrama, civilization, addiction, self, community, play, resilience
Also from
Kriger, Boris
The Evil of Banality: Hannah Arendt, Frames, Awareness, and the Refusal to Look Away
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$24.00
Freedom from Taxes: Introduction of Automated Payment Transaction Tax and Universal Basic Income
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$9.60
Why the Universe Is Not a Lottery: Attractors and the End of Cosmic Coincidence
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$30.00
Absurd Faith for an Absurd World: The Tertullian Paradox in the Age of Unreason
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$17.20
The Arithmetic of Happiness: How Jeremy Bentham Tried to Count the Human Soul
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
Cutting the Continuum: Zeno's Paradoxes from the Bounded Observer to the Edge of the Cosmos
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
A Theory of the Cinematic Masterpiece in the Generative Era: Temporal Sovereignty, the Carriers of Density, and Why Technical Progress Makes Art Deare
Kriger, Boris
Kriger, Peter
Halushko, Denys
Paperback
$13.20
Why We Don't Fly Like Birds: Gravity, Anatomy, and the Metaphysics of Freedom
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: How Accusation Became the World's Favorite Pastime
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Last Absolutism: Why Companies Are the Final Refuge of Autocracy
Kriger, Boris
Kaminski, Jaroslaw F.
Paperback
$28.80
How Knowledge Breaks and Remakes Itself: Thomas Kuhn and the Secret Life of Scientific Change
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
The Bluff of Decolonization in Controlled Chaos: Frantz Fanon and the Invisible Chains
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Morality Trap: How Humanity's Noblest Idea Became Its Most Dangerous Weapon
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
The Law of Imperative Uncertainty: Why Any Complex World Requires Uncertainty
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$23.88
Foundations of Intellectual Substrate Mining: A Methodology for Extracting Formal Laws from Raw Wisdom
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$28.80
Spinoza, Evolution, and the Model Trap: Why We Cannot Perceive Reality Directly
Kriger, Boris
Paperback
$26.40
Also in
Philosophy
Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
Taylor, Astra
Hunt-Hendrix, Leah
Hardcover
$14.99
In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument
Williams, Bernard
Paperback
$46.25
The American Indian Mind in a Linear World: American Indian Studies and Traditional Knowledge
Fixico, Donald Lee
Paperback
$72.79
Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media
Lowenstein, Adam
Paperback
$51.00
Machine Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Spiritual Freedom and the Re-Animation of Matter
Lafitte, Luke
Paperback
From $14.99
The Sociogony: Social Facts and the Ontology of Objects, Things, and Monsters
Worrell, Mark P.
Paperback
$43.50
On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Unpublished and Selected Writings
Pirsig, Wendy K.
Pirsig, Robert M.
Hardcover
$25.64
The Electromagnetic Brain: Em Field Theories on the Nature of Consciousness
Joye, Shelli Renée
Paperback
From $12.99
Philosophy in Turbulent Times: Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, Derrida
Roudinesco, Elisabeth
Paperback
$42.00
The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the Addition of Practic of the New Science
Vico, Giambattista
Paperback
$43.43
The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy
Giridharadas, Anand
Hardcover
$10.99
The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
Gottlieb, Anthony
Paperback
$9.99
The Modes of Scepticism: Ancient Texts and Modern Interpretations
Annas, Julia
Barnes, Jonathan
Julia, Annas
Paperback
$48.84
Friendship and Society: An Introduction to Augustine's Practical Philosophy
Burt, Donald X.
Paperback
$28.49
Essays V2: Moral And Entertaining On The Various Faculties And Passions Of The Human Mind (1815)
Clarendon, Edward Hyde Earl of
Paperback
$37.44
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living
Holiday, Ryan
Hanselman, Stephen
Hardcover
From $12.99
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger
Hardcover
From $19.99
The Obstacle Is the Way Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph
Holiday, Ryan
Hardcover
$26.60
Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us about Living
Jones, Peter
Hardcover
$27.00
Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness
Godfrey-Smith, Peter
Paperback
$19.00
The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse Fifth Anniversary Limited Edition: The Global Bestseller
Mackesy, Charlie
Hardcover
$28.49
Bless & Release: The physics of letting go-and wanting what's meant for you.
Laporte, Danielle
Paperback
$17.10
The Ethical Slut, Third Edition: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships, and Other Freedoms in Sex and Love
Easton, Dossie
Hardy, Janet W.
Paperback
$17.99
My Big TOE Awakening Discovery Inner Workings: The Complete My Big TOE Trilogy Unifying Philosophy, Physics and Metaphysics
Campbell, Thomas
Hardcover
$56.53
Self-Reliance and Nature: The Complete First and Second Series of Emerson's Essays
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Hardcover
$24.99
Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing
Smith, James K. A.
Hardcover
$26.60