On December 5, the KAIST Counseling Center invited Professor Hee-seok Park from Chosun University’s Division of Counseling Psychology to direct a psychodrama session with KAIST students as participants at the Creative Learning Building (E11).

Psychodrama is an action method, often used as psychotherapy, in which participants use spontaneous dramatization, role-playing, and dramatic self-presentation to investigate and gain insight into their lives. Psychodrama includes elements of theater, often conducted on a stage where props can be used. By closely recreating real-life situations and acting them out in the present, participants have the opportunity to evaluate their behavior and gain a deeper understanding of a particular situation in their lives. Psychodrama may be used in a variety of clinical and community-based settings, and is most often utilized in a group scenario, in which each person in the group can become therapeutic agents for one another's scenes.

In a session of psychodrama, one person from the group is given the role of the protagonist, and focuses on a particular situation to enact on stage. A variety of scenes may be enacted, depicting, for example, memories of specific happenings in that person’s past: unfinished situations, inner dramas, fantasies, dreams, preparations for future risk-taking situations, or unrehearsed expressions of mental state in the here and now. These scenes are either approximations of real-life situations or externalizations of inner mental processes. Other members of the group may become auxiliaries and support the protagonist by playing other significant roles in the scene.

The psychodrama was divided into three sections: warm-up, action, and sharing. During the warm-up, the students were encouraged to enter into a state of mind where they could be present in and aware of the current moment and were free to be creative. This was done through the use of different activities such as games. Next, the action section of the psychodrama session was the time in which the actual scenes themselves took place. Finally, in the sharing, the different actors were able to comment on the action and share their empathy and experiences with the protagonist of the scene.