22 Mar Japanese Colleagues: Givers in a World Culture of Getting
I spent last week with 16 Japanese professors and graduate students who traveled to NYC for an immersion in social therapeutics, the psychology of becoming, and a first-hand experience with how these “tools-and-results” help people grow by performing our sociality and building community. We had a wonderful time together. By the end of the second day, we put aside our scheduled topics and spent the rest of our time together exploring, unpacking and playing with the dozens of observations and questions they had for us from what we were doing together. Along the way, we played and performed with Japanese and English as, of course, such a grouping must.
Here is a drawing of the Japanese team, created by participant Makiko Kishi, who was the organizer of the group and main translator.
Nearly all of them had worked with me, Dan Friedman and/or Carrie Lobman during one of the four trips we’ve make to Japanese cities to work with educators and psychologists. It was truly a privilege to be able to introduce NYC to them and play hosts this time.
Some of the participants are currently translating my book, The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world. This is the sixth book by Institute colleagues published in Japanese in their efforts to spread social therapeutics and performative psychology in their country. The others are my Vygotsky at Work and Play and Schools for Growth; Carrie Lobman and Matt Lundquist’s Unscripted Learning; Cathy Salit’s Performance Breakthrough; and Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! We are honored!!
I was asked by our Japanese colleagues to write an introduction/preface to The Overweight Brain and to Let’s Develop! I realized that since these appear in Japanese, no one but Japanese speakers would ever read what I wrote.
I share them here in English.
For the Japanese publication of Let’s Develop!
I was Fred Newman’s intellectual partner and co-author from 1976 until he passed away in 2011. I got to know pretty him well during those thirty-five years. I imagine that his response to a Japanese translation of his book Let’s Develop! would surprise and delight him. He would be touched by those who wanted to bring the book to a Japanese readership, and appreciative of the hard work it takes to translate American English vernacular—as I am.
Fred was very loving and very provocative. These characteristics are apparent to me in the pages that follow, and I hope they come across to you too. His loving challenges to us to think, see and feel anew are presented through vignettes concerning ordinary people who find themselves trapped emotionally and/or relationally. He helps them discover a radical way out—the “Development Route” that can change everything. Nothing would please him (and me) more than if he helps you too.
Let’s Develop, Japan!
Lois Holzman
October 2018
For the Japanese publication of The Overweight Brain
Years ago, I was invited to write an autobiographical chapter for a book called Narrative identities: Psychologists engaged in self-construction(Yancy and Hadley, 2005). I accepted, being flattered to have been asked and excited by what I would discover by writing such a thing. I didn’t have any idea of what to share with readers about my life. I just knew I wanted to avoid any kind of explanation as to why my life has gone the way it has. That’s because I think explanations are what people make up in order to give some pattern or coherency or meaning to life’s twists and turns, jumbles and messes, joys and sorrows. And I have come to believe very strongly that we not only don’t need explanations but, even more, that they do us damage. Explanations are a huge part of the knowing paradigm, which is the subject of this book, The Overweight Brain.
I cannot tell you why I wrote The Overweight Brain, nor why it is, apparently, believed to be worthy of the hard work of translating it into Japanese. I do not know and I do not think we can ever know. But, without knowing, I can tell you several things.
I can tell you that the title came to me first. I wrote it down and kept looking at it for many days. And on one of those days I said to myself, “That’s a great title for a book! Maybe I should write it!” And I did.
I can tell you that I am very happy that the book has been successful in ways that are important to me. It invites people to think and talk about things they never thought or spoke about before, and it gives people permission to create some new kinds of conversations with themselves and with others.
I can tell you I am thrilled and honored by this Japanese translation of my words, but more than that, by the generosity and enthusiasm of the translating team and other dear colleagues for their embracing and expanding “non-knowing growing” and the global development community that practices it.
Lois Holzman
New York City
March 2019
Holzman L. (2005). Performing a Life (Story). In G. Yancy and S. Hadley (Eds.), Narrative identities: Psychologists engaged in self-construction. [pp. 96-111] London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
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