Centre for Applied Psychodrama Inquiry (CAPI)
A space for radical presence, ethical encounter, and collective imagination.
CAPI brings together practitioners, scholars, educators, artists, and activists who use psychodrama not only as a method—but as a mode of inquiry. We explore how action methods can respond to personal, social, and planetary urgencies through ethical, relational, and creative means.
This is a living site of experimentation. Here, psychodrama meets philosophy, decolonial thought, pedagogy, performance, and environmental concern. Through dialogues, workshops, publications, and video showcases, CAPI deepens the psychodramatic tradition beyond therapy—toward research, education, and world-making.
Further information
What does “applied inquiry” mean?
We mean the ongoing, critical reflection on how psychodrama enters the world:
- In community projects
- In institutional training
- In cultural contexts with complex histories
- In policy, education, conflict, and transformation
It’s not about using psychodrama to answer questions.
It’s about questioning what happens when we apply the method.
What does “first ethics” mean?
“First ethics” refers to the idea—found in the work of Emmanuel Levinas—that ethical responsibility precedes knowledge, method, or structure. That before we know what to do, we are already in relation with the Other. CAPI draws on this outlook. Rather than viewing psychodrama as a method to be mastered, we ask:
- What remains unspoken or unseen?
- Who are we responsible to?
- What are we enacting, even unintentionally?
Is this a critique of training institutes?
Not a rejection—but a challenge to their narrowing.
Many institutes do extraordinary work in training and applying the method. But the emphasis on certification, hierarchy, and replicable outcomes can sometimes limit the ethical imagination and relational depth that gave birth to the method itself.
CAPI exists to hold space for what cannot be certified:
- Unfinished thinking
- Ethical tensions
- Decolonial discomforts
- Poetic reflections
- Border-crossing dialogues
What topics do you usually write about on My Blog?
I share a variety of personal experiences, lessons learned, and thoughts on everyday life.
Isn’t all psychodrama already an inquiry? Why create a separate space for it?
Yes—and that is exactly our point of departure.
Psychodrama inherently involves inquiry: into roles, relationships, the self, the group, and the world. But in many contemporary settings, this inquiry has become subordinated to outcomes—therapeutic goals, assessment rubrics, institutional requirements, and certification pathways.
CAPI does not oppose these structures, but it refuses to reduce the method to them.
We ask: What happens when inquiry is returned to its ethical and philosophical depth?
CAPI seeks to hold open a reflective space before, beneath, and beyond professional training—where psychodrama’s relational, ethical, and cultural foundations can be explored without being instrumentalised.
Who is CAPI for? Do I need to be a trained psychodramatist to take part?
No. CAPI welcomes:
- Practitioners who wish to reflect on their work outside institutional structures
- Researchers and students drawing on psychodrama in interdisciplinary contexts
- Philosophers, educators, artists, and activists engaging with the method’s worldview
- People at the edges of the method—witnesses, collaborators, critics, and co-thinkers
We believe that critical insight does not only come from inside the circle. Sometimes those outside the role see what’s missing.
Is CAPI a training institute?
No. CAPI is not a training body and does not offer certification.
It is not aligned with any one school, tradition, or curriculum.
Instead, it acts as:
- A platform for experimental and ethical engagement with psychodrama’s applications
- A reflective commons
- A bridge between psychodrama and other fields
- A place to think with, through, and around the method