Check out my guest column in Psychology Today’s Rethinking Psychology (Eric Maisel’s column)

“Cosmetic Changes to the DSM-V (Did the DSM-5 Task Force Really Back Down?)”

Recently the DSM-5 Task Force of psychiatrists dropped two diagnoses from its new manual—“attenuated psychosis syndrome” (proposed to identify people at risk of developing psychosis), and “mixed anxiety depressive disorder” (a hybrid of two mood problems). This is welcome news to both mental health professionals and the people who utilize them. (The story was reported widely, including in The New York Times: “Psychiatry Manual Drafters Back Down on Diagnoses” (May 8, 2012).

At the same time, in dropping two diagnoses and “tweaking” some others because of lack of evidence, the DSM-5 Task Force of psychiatrists is perpetuating the belief that they are doing science. READ MORE at Rethinking Psychology

The Institute jumped into the free webinar field at the beginning of this year.

It’s much simpler than I would have thought! We give people access to an audio or video. After listening/viewing, they can join an hour-long live chat, email questions and comments, or do nothing. I’ve led the online chat twice (with other Institute faculty doing the others) and I really enjoy how much we get to know each other through the improvisational conversation we create out of questions and comments.

The May webinar is on social therapy. The material is an audio interview a Brazilian psychologist conducted with me two years ago when I was in Brazil. (It’s in English.) I trace  some of the history of social therapy. I introduce my work as a post-doctoral student in Michael Cole’s laboratory at Rockefeller University in the late 1970s and my meeting Fred Newman and founding the East Side Institute. The interview presents some of the highlights of the next 40 years of engagement and conversations with radical and critical psychologists, social constructionists, humanists, Vygotskians, Marxists, activity theorists, and the narrative therapy movement. People who’ve listened to it really like it! (I’ll be listening to it before the chat!)

If you’re interested, the interview is available at http://eastsideinstitute.org/audio_files/LHolzman%20Ricardo%20Lana.WAV at your convenience.  I’ll be leading the instant chat on Friday, May 18, 12:00 PM EST. Contact Mary Fridley at mfridley@eastsideinstitute.org for webinar registration.

If you can’t make it, you can share questions and comments at webinar@eastsideinstitute.org.

I don’t usually promote activities here but now is an exception. Recent posts on the DSM-5 and all that it reveals about the ways our culture relates to human emotionality have drawn new readers (much thanks to everyone who’s reposting!). I’ve been introduced to many others who are writing, blogging, and generally working hard to expand the dialogue and to share “best non-diagnostic practices.”

Which is why I decided to share one of the programs of my Institute—Social Therapy as Clinical Practice. They’re training weekends being held in March, May and November, 2012 in New York City. They’re open to social workers, counselors, psychologists, medical professionals, and educators who favor non-diagnostic, relational approaches to mental health.

Interested?

Social Therapy as Clinical Practice

Social therapy is the group-oriented, development-focused psychotherapy that relates to people of all ages as performers and creators of their lives. Its unique approach to emotionality as social activity places it at the cutting edge of postmodern therapeutic approaches.

Intensive training weekends are an effective way to learn this powerful approach to group therapy. Each four-day training will focus on a specific aspect of social therapeutic method introduced experientially through diverse learning activities: social therapeutic role-plays, observations of therapy groups, reflection sessions with social therapists, group supervisions, and seminars linking theory and practice.

2012 Schedule

Thursday-Sunday, March 8-11

Thursday-Sunday, May 17-20

Thursday-Sunday, November 29-December 2

Fee

$475.00 per training weekend. 20% discount on two or more.

To learn more about social therapy and/or download an application, go to http://www.eastsideinstitute.org/ClinicalTraining.html or contact Christine LaCerva at clacerva@socialtherapygroup.com.

Want to read something first?

Psychological Investigations: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy Edited by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez  Psychological Investigations explores the nature of the social therapeutic group process, the social therapeutic relationship, and applications to health care, alternative medicine, education and youth development. The book features over 70 dialogues between Fred Newman, the creator of social therapy, and therapists-in-training, These dialogues, together with introductory overviews by Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez, are a provocative invitation to both new and seasoned professionals seeking alternative modes of practice and understanding. (Brunner-Routledge, 2003)

Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth

by Fred Newman with Phyllis Goldberg

In a culture of “getting,” this is the little book that keeps on giving. The 2010 edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! has a foreword by Patch Adams (the peripatetic, clowning MD) and new introduction by Lois Holzman. Based on 25 years of clinical practice and his discovery that people can reinitiate development at any stage in life, Newman urges his readers to eschew insights, explanations or getting to the “bottom” of deep-rooted emotional problems and seek their cure in development.

 

 

 

A huge thanks to my friend Tony Perone for alerting me to a recent TED Talk by Stephen Volan, “Approaching Autism Theatrically.” Diagnosed with Asperger’s as an adult, Stephen shares how he experiences himself in the world, at one point likening it to just about constant stage fright. His talk is lovely—funny, poignant, smart. He brings in the DSM-5, Second City, Virginia Spolin, his height (6’8″), play, improv, Shakespeare, as he tells of his journey to become a social player “on the stage that is all the world.”

Support the dialogue on human development/possibility/becoming by passing this video along!

Zdravo da Ste Weekend

December 29, 2011

I returned from Serbia a few weeks ago, energized from six very performatory days with friends old and new. Nearly every year since 1997 as winter begins I’ve made the journey to work and play with the extraordinary people of Zdravo da Ste (“Hi Neighbor”). They’re a group of psychologists, educators, social and youth workers who’ve created a Vygotskian-influenced approach to performance and group creativity, and take it into collective centers, schools and cultural institutions in villages, towns and cities across the country. Above all, they are developmentalists. They’ve devised elegantly simple ways to engage children, youth and adults in creating common joint activity—whether that takes a musical, artistic, poetic, dance, performance or conversational form, there is no goal external to the activity. Such a non-instrumental, tool-and-result method is dear to my heart.

So are the hundred or so people of Zdravo da Ste that I have come to know through the common joint activity we create one weekend a year. We have great love for each other as both comrades and family members can—love grown from mutual passion for a better world, fierce commitment to each other, and ever-growing understanding of and respect for each other’s uniqueness born of historical and cultural difference.

This year, we spent the weekend Vrnjacka Banja—a small town in the south known for its healing mineral waters—in workshops creating performances around the topic of identity as an individual and collective process. On Monday, workshop leaders (myself, Lina Kostarova-Unkovska, Paul Murray and Tim Prentki) brought the topic and conversation to Belgrade, as panelists hosted by psychologist Bojana Skorc at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Belgrade.

In 2009 Zdravo da Ste and publisher Dragan Stojkovic of MOSTART released the Serbian edition of Fred Newman’s Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth (translated by Bojana and Zdravo da Ste founder psychologist Vesna Ogjenovic). Social workers, psychologists, youth workers and educators in Serbia and other countries of the former Yugoslavia have a way to be introduced to Newman, social therapeutics, the performatory approach developed and practiced at the Institute, and to Zdravo da Ste’s unique way of generating development.

While in Serbia, I also led two workshops, one in Belgrade and the other in Novi Sad, organized by 2010 graduates of the Institute’s International Class Tamara Borovica, Bojan Drmonjic, Tamara Maksic and Milovan Savic. It was fun and challenging and especially rewarding to spend several hours creating with nearly 60 new performance playmates. I hope to see many of them, along with my old Zdravo da Ste friends, in New York City in October at Performing the World 2012: Can Performance Save the World?

Regarding the topic of identity, I invited those in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Vrnjacka Banja to challenge the hold our societal identities have on us by embracing (or, at a minimum, considering) our historical “identity” as creators and transformers of how things happen to be at any given societal place and time. It’s a common joint activity the world needs very much right now.

Part of a Performance in Nov Sad

New Performers in Belgrade

I love my responsibility as chair of Global Outreach for the All Star’s Project’s UX because of the opportunities I get to bring people together who wouldn’t ordinarily meet. Like the immigrant young people from Rome who run their own community, the inner-city young people and adults in New York City who participate in growthful learning opportunities at the All Stars, the student body of the East Side Institute, and any other interested New Yorkers.

I’m currently leading the second phase of my ongoing series, “The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman,” at the East Side Institute. For this coming Monday’s session we’re going to play around with two of Newman’s “Psychology Plays”—written expressly for performance at APA (American Psychological Association) annual conventions during the 1990s. Titled “The Myth of Psychology”, the play consists of two acts, each one a therapy session with Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein and a social therapist.

I love these plays! They are delightfully comic and educative, no matter whether you are familiar with the characters or get the many, many in jokes or not. Of course I’m rereading the text of the play in preparation for my class and thought I’d share a favorite section from Act 2.

Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are now the best of friends and have come to understand each other well except on one issue: they can’t understand how the other is (in Vygotsky’s case) and is not (in Wittgenstein’s case) a revolutionary. We pick up at the point in the session where they ask the therapist Bette what she means by being a revolutionary.

BETTE: To me, being a revolutionary has more to do with how you believe or understand than with what you believe. Now, of course, the two are connected in complex and ever-changing ways. Still, how you connect or relate your subjective life with the world determines what I mean by being a revolutionary.

WITTGENSTEIN: So revolutionary refers then to a way of looking at things?

BETTE: Yes, you might put it that way, Dr. Wittgenstein.

VYGOTSKY: But doesn’t how we look at things depend at least to some extent on how those things are?

BETTE: Yes, Lev. But how those things are also depends on how they are looked at.

WITTGENSTEIN: So you’re saying that things — or whatever — have no objective nature independent of their being related to by conscious beings? Doesn’t that simply raise the old idealistic philosophical saw about whether the tree falls in the forest if no one sees or hears it?

BETTE: Well, Dr. Wittgenstein, I’m not saying that things — or whatever — have no objective nature independent of their being related to by conscious human beings. I’m saying — following your work on these matters — that the language game of objective-subjective can be and often is a no-win game — a metaphysical confusion.

WITTGENSTEIN: Well, tell that to your comrade — and my friend — Vygotsky over here. Because he believes in some Marxian notion of objective historical laws.

VYGOTSKY: I do, Bette. He’s right. I cannot accept that everything is subjective.

BETTE: Nor can I, Lev. Nor can I. But I also cannot accept that everything is objective. Indeed, I can’t even accept that everything is. And no one has made that clearer than Karl Marx and … Lev Vygotsky. Psychology, you insisted — if I understand you correctly — is a cultural understanding of becoming, not a pseudo-scientific understanding of what is.

WITTGENSTEIN: So the puzzle, if you will, has to do with that funny little verb “to be.” “To be or not to be, that is the question.”

BETTE: I think not, Dr. Wittgenstein. That is the problem. Shakespeare’s Hamlet gives us, perhaps, the purest expression of modernist alienation when he says, “To be or not to be.” For if we are, like everything else, becoming, then “to be or not to be” denies what we are by apparently exhausting all the possibilities (being or not being) without realizing that we are both — and neither — namely, we are all forever becoming.

I’m eager to see what I and 30 ordinary people from many different walks of life—all “non-philosophers”—make out of this.

I was delighted to come across this Amazon reader review of my book Vygotsky at Work and Play. The author is David R. Cross, Ph.D.

Thanks, David!

 A Transformative Book Reflecting on a Transformative Life, July 2, 2011

Every now and then you get lucky, and find the book that is just the book you need at that point in your career to take the next step forward. (I used “book” in this opening sentence, but the same could be said for “article” or “presentation,” but here we are concerned with books.) Lois Holzman’s Vygotsky at Work and Play is just that sort of book. Up until reading it, I had been unaware of Lois Holzman’s work, and this book is a great introduction. It is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a conceptual reflection on her several decades of good work. The book is short, well-written, and a great lead-in to the work Holzman has done, mostly in partnership with Fred Newman. Their work is both multifaceted and highly innovative, and it challenges some traditional conceptions about how science is done. Their work is multifaceted because they have made significant contributions to therapy (social therapy), schooling, out-of-school (youth) programs, and the workplace (organizations). The same conceptual principles underly all of this work, which derive mainly from Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Their work is innovative for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their methodology. Part of their innovation is their (re)conceptualization of Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development,” and another part is their emphasis on performance, both as a product and a process of development in context. This is a book worth reading.

In my work as a developmentalist, I am an advocate of, doer of, and studier of play. I grapple with both implementing and understanding what Lev Vygotsky said: “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself” —and its practical applications and implications for people of all ages.

Having begun a three-session East Side Institute Revolutionary Conversation last night (where we touched on play quite a bit) and preparing today for a keynote address on play, performance and pretense that I’ll give in a few weeks at the Association for Experiential Education international conference, I’ve been playing with play today. Here’s some thoughts to ponder and comment on—and aid me in my thinking/speaking!

Vygotsky tells us that it’s the interplay of imagination—which frees us, and rules—which constrain us, that makes play potentially developmental. The action created in the “imaginative sphere” frees the players from situational constraints and, at the same time, imposes constraints of its own. In this way, “play creates a zone of proximal development of the child… Action in the imaginative sphere, in an imaginary situation, the creation of voluntary intentions, and the formation of real-life plans and volitional motives – all appear in play and make it the highest level of preschool development.”

This freedom from environmental constraints (“reality”) in free play has similarities with theatrical play, or performance, especially the unscripted, improvisational kind. In both free and theatrical play, the players are more directly the producers of their activity, in charge of generating and coordinating the perceptual, cognitive and emotional elements of the play. When I look at children’s free play with this performance lens, I see the value of play in a new light.

For most psychologists and educators the value of play is that it facilitates the learning of social-cultural roles. Through acting out roles (play-acting), children “try out” the roles they will soon take on in “real life.”

I get this, but I think it skips over the paradox of pretend play—when children are pretending, they are least like what they are pretending to be! When they play school they are least like teachers and students because teachers and students in school are not playing at being teachers and students, but rather acting out their societally determined roles. Children playing school, or Mommy and Daddy, or Harry Potter and Dumbledore, are not acting out predetermined roles. They are creating new performances of themselves—at once the playwrights, directors and performers. They are creating culture. This is how I make sense of Vygotsky’s understanding that in play the child acts as though a head taller —that the developmental potential of play is as performed activity and not as behavioral acting. Not only for chidren but for us all.

October 3, 2012

Here’s a more graphic rendition of the Performing the World invitation and call for proposals.