Angewandte Improvisation in der Psychotherapie

The article describes how applied improvisation can be used in the context of psychotherapy to make basic therapeutic models of social interaction easier to understand and practically applicable in everyday life. For psychotherapy in the sense of interactional mindfulness, applied improvisation provides an attitude and a large repertoire of exercises with which the conscious and flexible shaping of relationships can be trained in a playful way. The essential principles of applied improvisation are presented in order to build on this and explain how applied improvisation can be used in a meaningful way specifically in the context of psychotherapy. To this end, principles and exercises from improvisational theater are combined with basic concepts of psychotherapy. In particular, the article provides an overview of empirically proven models for shaping social interactions using the consistency theory, the circumplex model and the rupture and repair approach.