In my latest The Overweight Brain poll, read some great Wittgenstein quotes and choose your favorites! Here are the quotes. (To vote, go to the Reader Poll slider on the home page, click on it and scroll down to the poll.) “The atmosphere surrounding this problem is terrible. Dense clouds of language...
I spent the past weekend in Philadelphia at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. One of the events I participated in was a half-day professional development course. My task was to share aspects of my version of cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) in relation to the issues...
Congratulations to Thomas Teo on the release of the Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, for which he served as editor. The massive (2400 pages) anthology published by Springer Reference is “the first reference work in English that comprehensively looks at psychological topics from critical as well as international points of view.” Teo,...
December 10, 2013 My article, "Critical psychology, philosophy and social therapy," appears in the current issue of the journal, Human Studies, A Journal of Philosophy and the Social Sciences (Volume 6, Number 24, 2013). According to the rules of academic publishers, I can share the accepted draft of the article but...
December 1, 2013 Los Más Grandes Mitos Acerca de las Emociones & Como Debilitarlos ¿Donde viven las emociones? La respuesta te puede sorprender. (translated by Sandra Paola Lopez: "The Biggest Myths about Emotions and How to Weaken Their Grip") Con toda esta cháchara acerca de las emociones y el cerebro, usted podrá pensar que...
May 29, 2013 To New York Times columnist and cultural and political commentator David Brooks, psychiatrists are not heroes of science but “heroes of uncertainty.” Such is the title of his May 27, 2013 Op-Ed piece. Brooks takes the compilers of the DSM-5 and contemporary psychiatry to task for presenting their field...
January 29, 2013 A few days ago I wrote about the long lag time for reviews of academic books. Here’s an example very close to home. During my Internet searches this weekend I came across a new review of my book, Vygotsky at Work and Play. (You can click on it...
January 9, 2012 To go a bit deeper into the underlying problems with the theory and practice of psychology that the controversy over the DSM-5 exposes, I invite you to do some philosophizing. What assumptions must people be making— about persons; therapy, the therapeutic relationship and therapeutic discourse; illness, cure and treatment; emotions...
October 26, 2011 Question: What's it like to participate in an academic conference taking place in China and on the topic of contemporary capitalism? Answer: An academic conference. Which is to say that you have to do the work to create human connection/conversation outside the rigid conference structure of one person after another...
October 17, 2011 Last week in The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman we played with the Newman play in which Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein are in therapy with a social therapist (referred to in my last post). I asked folks to break up into four groups and perform the readings of the...