While living in Vienna in the early 1900s Moreno started an
improvisational theater company,
Stegreiftheater, the Theater of Spontaneity where he formulated a form of psychotherapy he called psychodrama, which employed improvised dramatizations,
role-plays and other therapeutic, spontaneous dramatic expressions that utilized and unleashed the spontaneity and creativity of the group and its individual members. The
New York Times wrote "He found that acceptance of his theories was slow, particularly because some colleagues deplored his showmanship." He worked at the Plymouth Institute, Brooklyn, and at
Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1929, he founded an Impromptu Theater at
Carnegie Hall and later did work at the Guild Theater. He made studies of sociometry at
Sing Sing Prison in 1931. In 1932, Moreno first introduced group psychotherapy to the
American Psychiatric Association, and co-authored the monograph
Group Method and Group Pschotherapy with
Helen Hall Jennings. He and Jennings were the first to use a
stochastic network model (or, "chance sociogram", as they called it), predating the
Erdős–Rényi model and the network model of
Anatol Rapoport. In 1936, he founded the Beacon Hill Sanitarium, and the adjacent Therapeutic Theater. For the next 40 years he developed and introduced his Theory of Interpersonal Relations and tools for social sciences he called 'sociodrama', 'psychodrama', 'sociometry', and 'sociatry'. In his monograph entitled, "The Future of Man's World", he describes how he developed these sciences to counteract "the economic
materialism of
Marx, the psychological materialism of Freud, and the technological materialism" of our modern
industrial age. In 1954, he was a founding member of the International Committee on Group Psychotherapy, which later transformed into the International Association of Group Psychotherapy. , grave of Jacob Levy Moreno His autobiography describes his position as "threefold: • Spontaneity and creativity are the propelling forces in human progress, beyond and independent of libido and socioeconomic motives [that] are frequently interwoven with spontaneity-creativity, but [this proposition] does deny that spontaneity and creativity are merely a function and derivative of libido or socioeconomic motives. • Love and mutual sharing are powerful, indispensable working principles in group life. Therefore, it is imperative that we have faith in our fellow man's intentions, a faith which transcends mere obedience arising from physical or legalistic coercion. • That a super dynamic community based on these principles can be brought to realization through new techniques..." ==Summary of contributions==