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 and cognition; and mind, body and brain— in order to have their relationships mediated by a manual? For decades, critical psychologists, postmodern psychologists and philosophers have been exploring this big question. Fred Newman and I included. Here’s some philosophical food for thought from two philosophers who’ve helped us develop our own non-medical model approach—social therapy—and to appreciate discursive, collaborative and social constructionist approaches that reject (to varying degrees) the authority of so-called objectivity when it comes to human life as lived.

First, from Ludwig Wittgenstein. He had a unique way of doing philosophy that exposed “the pathology” embedded in language and conceptions of language, thoughts and emotions, and wanted to cure philosophy of its “illness.” An illness stemming from how we think, especially how we think about “mental” processes and/or objects. As Wittgenstein detailed in his writings, the problem with our thinking is that we’re obsessed with finding causes, correspondences, rules, parallels, generalities, theories, interpretations, and explanations for our thoughts, words and verbal deeds. It gives us “mental cramps” and, in his often blunt way of putting things, he tells us:

There is nothing more stupid than the chatter about cause and effect in history books; nothing is more wrong-handed, more half-baked.

Next, the American philosopher John Searle. In his recent book, Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization, Searle begins:

How, if at all, can we reconcile a certain conception of the world as described by physics, chemistry, and the other basic sciences with what we know, or think we know, about ourselves as human beings? How is it possible in a universe consisting entirely of physical particles in fields of force that there can be such things as consciousness, intentionality, free will, language, society, ethics, aesthetics, and political obligations? Though many, perhaps most, contemporary philosophers do not address it directly, I believe that this is the single overriding question in contemporary philosophy.

Psychologists need to join philosophers like Searle and Wittgenstein in asking this question instead of continuing to function with conceptions and methods constructed upon a foundation of dualistic separations of objective-subjective, physical-mental and body-mind.

Ken Gergen is among the few psychologists who have done so for decades. While I could quote from any number of his books and articles, I want to get back to diagnosis. In 1995, Gergen and Fred Newman presented a paper at APA entitled, “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order” (published in Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind.). It’s a polemic against psychological dualism, a critique of dominant views of the vocabulary of mind, an exploration of the philosophical assumptions that underlie diagnosis and the DSM, and a call for the democratization of diagnosis:

Despite all our facetious observations about the more absurd characterizations in DSM-IV, it ain’t funny.  Why? Because in everyday pictorial, identity-theoretic therapy these descriptions (diagnoses) are frequently used to stigmatize, constrain, and punish those to whom they are applied.  We do not change that by any kind of analysis.  We change it only by changing the diagnostic form of alienation: opening up diagnosing to everyone, continuously, although non-referentially and non-judgmentally.  We can all perform diagnosing together.  Not to get it right.  Not to give everyone a chance to do it.  But to create/perform jointly a zone of relational development (if we may take poetic license with Vygotsky’s formulation) in which we can together create new forms of life, new meanings, new lives.”

I’ve been following the controversy over the latest revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM-5. Compiled and published by the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM is the diagnostic bible for mental health professionals the world over—and a cash cow for the Association (which, by some accounts, earns $5 million each year from sales of the book), the pharmaceutical multinationals and health insurance companies. The DSM has undergone five revisions since it first appeared in 1952 and while each has had its share of critics, the proposed DSM-5 is getting serious pushback, complete with a petition and grassroots campaign among psychiatrists, psychologists and other mental health providers.

Here’s a summary statement of what’s viewed as problematic from An Open Letter to the DSM-5 Task Force circulated by the Society for Humanistic Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association:

Though we admire various efforts of the DSM-5 Task Force, especially efforts to update the manual according to new empirical research, we have substantial reservations about a number of the proposed changes that are presented on www.dsm5.org.  As we will detail below, we are concerned about the lowering of diagnostic thresholds for multiple disorder categories, about the introduction of disorders that may lead to inappropriate medical treatment of vulnerable populations, and about specific proposals that appear to lack empirical grounding. In addition, we question proposed changes to the definition(s) of mental disorder that deemphasize sociocultural variation while placing more emphasis on biological theory. In light of the growing empirical evidence that neurobiology does not fully account for the emergence of mental distress, as well as new longitudinal studies revealing long-term hazards of standard neurobiological (psychotropic) treatment, we believe that these changes pose substantial risks to patients/clients, practitioners, and the mental health professions in general.

By mid-December, nearly 10,000 had signed the petition, prompting its initiator David Elkins (professor emeritus at Pepperdine University and president of the Division) to comment, “This has become a grassroots movement among mental health professionals, who are saying we already have a national problem with overmedication of children and the elderly, and we don’t want to exacerbate that” (quoted in Salon).

I signed the petition. I spread the word and urge others to sign. I’m encouraged by the support the petition is getting, for it’s giving mental health professionals a way to voice their dissatisfaction with the institutionalized constraints of their work (which include the hard fact that if they didn’t use the DSM they’d be out of a job).

And yet… As supportive of this reform effort as I am, I’m not a reformer. Of course we shouldn’t OVERdiagnosis. Critiquing the DSM-5 because it “goes overboard” is one thing. Critiquing the diagnostic paradigm and the entirety of the medical model approach to human emotionality is another. Thousands of people have been helped with their “mental illness” through social therapy and others approaches that relate to human beings with integrity, that is, as human beings and not as brains, minds, bodies and/or behaviors. That relate to mental health/illness as an issue of emotional and relational growth. That don’t depend on a so-called objective assessment of a person’s “illness” by an “expert” who consults a manual that was made up by other “experts.”  And I do mean made up. The DSM is authoritarian through and through—and as far from authoritative as can be.

Fred Newman, my mentor and colleague, was a big critic of the mainstream, and he created the social therapy alternative. He got a lot of flak for it from the protectors of the status quo. Not because he objected to its “excesses,” but because he objected to its misguided and destructive “essence.”  For one of our books, Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life, I did a lot of research on the history of how psychology created itself. For the chapter, “Psychology’s Best-Seller: Mental Illness and Mental Health,” I drew upon some excellent critiques and exposés of the medical model, pseudoscientific approach to mental health, and the chapter presents the political, economic and cultural foundations and impacts of psychology’s understanding of mental illness, and the blatant opportunism of various players who created the industry. I wish some of this back-story was part of the current campaign against the DSM-5.

I end this rather long post with something Newman and I wrote in Unscientific Psychology. With the DSM-5 revision process and grassroots movement against it going on, it’s as good a time as any to give the book a read.

Psychology has no subject matter; not in the sense that there is no such thing as human subjective (conscious) relational experience or uniquely human interaction, but in the sense that such activity, such life, is essentially inseparable from its study by those (human beings) who participate in it. A star is, presumably, “starring” whether it is seen or not. But a human seer (a perceiver) cannot be consciously seeing unless one is seen—if only by “oneself.” The study of subjectivity cannot possibly achieve the distance required to be a science. Therefore, psychology, in its vulgar commitment to its own existence and cash value, creates that distance. But in doing so it “loses” its subject matter! Scientific psychology is, in our story, an ancient religion in modern (scientific) dress.

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

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 lecturing. It’s hard work, especially when you don’t speak the language of 90% of the participants!  But it’s well worth it in the new friends you make and the new learnings you gain.

The conference banner

This past weekend I was one of four non-Chinese guest speakers (the “Western Marxists”) at the Third International Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies in Hangzhou, China.  The sponsors were the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory, Department of Philosophy, and School of Marxism at Nanjing University, and the Center for Marxist Studies at Hangzhou University, About 70 people were there in total, “senior” and “junior” scholars, postdocs, and graduate students in philosophy, social theory and Marxist studies. While the presentations were all over the place with regard to topic, the challenge many of the Chinese presentations tried to engage was understanding how China is (and/or should be) facing capitalism: Do Marxian concepts shed some light on this question and, if so, which ones? What role do traditional Chinese values play in China’s growing economy; are they hindering or helpful, both or neither?  Are we witnessing capitalism ‘s (“inevitable”) collapse; if we are, then what’s next?

My presentation, on Fred Newman and the Practice of Method introduced Newman to the Chinese scholars and explicated our development community’s work as the postmodernizing and therapeutization of Marx. The other Westerners—Neil Harding from Wales, David McNally from Toronto and Ian Parker from Britain—introduced new conceptual tools as ways of seeing current class struggle, building socialism and engaging in resistance.

Unfortunately, there was little dialogue that might have led to us creating some new understandings. But informally I had some wonderfully lively and moving conversations with “the younger generation” who were eager to explore what it means to practice method (and not just do theory), to create emotionality, and to build community. Some of these took place at the spectacular West Lake and the park that surrounds it, and at extraordinarily delicious banquet meals.

New Friends Jayson and Lily

From Hangzhou we went to the city of Nanjing, where I led a class for philosophy postdoc students on Marx, Vygotsky, Wittgenstein and Social Therapy. I began with a brief introduction of how I came to Marx, philosophy and therapy as a political organizer (and developmental psychologist). Then I asked them to perform part of the play, “The Myth of Psychology” in which Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are in therapy and talking about Karl Marx. Just as participants in my Thought Leadership of Fred Newman class in NY, those in Nanjing really got into it. They asked how could we speak of fetishization outside of political economy, what Social Therapy looks like, what to do about “objective” unhappiness in the world, and the relationship between changing the world and changing ourselves.

I thank the students for their willingness to create a playful and open learning environment with me and for their great questions. Professor Huaiyu Liu and Dr. Jing Wu  (who translated for me) were fabulous “completers” of my thinking and my English words. All in all, a great time was had by all! I later found out that I had given No. 88 in the Marxist seminar series of the Center for Studies of Marxist Social Theory!

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 play in any way they wanted. I said that plays are meant to be performed and that inviting them to perform it together would, I hoped and expected, create an open and creative environment for ensuing conversation. One group broke themselves up into the three characters and commented that it was lovely to hear and relate to multiple Wittgensteins and Vygotskys and Brauns. Another group played with pitch and loudness, and ended with whispering the lines into each other’s ears. There was no shortage of creativity among the groups!

The conversation we wound up creating meandered (my favorite kind) with, in hindsight, a continued focus on what it means to understand and how we create understanding, both as individuals and as a group. Specifically, we spent time speaking about “will” and “motivation” and the activity of doing the unexpected and its relationship to playing like children (what does it mean that, as one participant said, “Everyone was willing to go into the groups and perform”); about reading/performing when you have no idea what you’re reading (the assumption being this is not a good thing, but we questioned that in light of assumptions about what language is); and about the experience of appreciating what they created.

Tonight is the final week. The reading is an article by Newman and Ken Gergen, expanded from an APA presentation the two of them made in 1995. It’s titled, “Diagnosis: The Human Cost of the Rage to Order.” (It’s a chapter in my edited book, Performing Psychology.) I’m looking forward to helping the class with this challenging and important academic piece that argues for a move away from both pictorial and a pragmatic views of language to one of relational activity—and the democratization of diagnosis. Vygotsky and Wittgenstein are, again, characters. As is social therapy, this time with Newman himself.

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.

October 2, 2011

I’m thrilled to announce the next Performing the World (PTW) conference/festival, “Can Performance Change Save the World?” to take place in New York City October 4-7, 2012. Proposals are due March 1, 2012.

The theme of the last PTW, held in 2010 and attended by over 500 people from dozens of countries, was, “Can Performance Change the World?” The depth of the challenges facing humanity two short years later have led the conveners of Performing the World to recast the question for the 2012 conference as, “Can Performance Save the World?”

Performing the World (PTW) was born in a conversation between East Side Institute co-founder, the late Fred Newman, and me at the end of the summer of 2000. We had already “discovered” performance, and its essential role in human development and learning was key to the therapeutic, educational and community-organizing work of the East Side Institute and its broader community. At the same time, Newman and I were also having conversations with Ken and Mary Gergen, leading social-constructionist psychologists who themselves were turning toward performance, particularly by experimenting with new performatory modes of presenting research and scholarship. During the 1990s at annual meetings of the American Psychological Association, we and the Gergens did some joint performatory symposia and Newman’s original “psychology plays” were performed—all to great enthusiasm. We were encouraged, and wanted to do something bigger and of our own structure.

My international travels had introduced me to many different performatory practices initiated at both the grassroots and from within the universities. I met dozens of people and heard of hundreds more who were using performance to help people and communities grow and create positive social change. We decided to reach out to those doing this work/play—from community organizers to business people, from artists to social workers, from therapists to teachers.

The first Performing the World conference was held in October 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11. Hundreds from all over the world showed up at the beautiful ocean side village of Montauk, 120 miles from New York City, as if this kind of gathering was what they and their communities needed at such a moment.

There have been five PTWs since then. The last two—in 2008 and 2010—were held in New York City, bringing the conference to one of the most vibrant and diverse cultural centers of the world and partnering with the All Stars Project as co-sponsor. PTW has been greatly enriched by having the All Stars’ performing arts and development center on 42 Street near Times Square as the conference’s home base and by the inclusion of hundreds of young people and adults who participate in its programs. Additionally, both the Institute and the All Stars reach out to friends across New York City’s many communities to provide housing for PTW participants and broaden the “performance space.” I am inspired by the growth of the global performance movement and the role that PTW is playing in it, as not only a conference/performance festival but also a unique community event bringing people together to perform a new world.

I’m on a working vacation at the beautiful ocean community of Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island. Today, after the preparations for and actuality of Hurrican Irene (which was not too bad out here), I got to some reading. One book is Rom Harre’s Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrodinger’s Cat: Scenes from the Living Laboratory, an unusual but very accessible book about how living things have contributed to a scientific understanding of the world. It got me thinking about my friend and mentor, the late Fred Newman. How much he would have enjoyed Harre’s book (Fred was enamored of the creativity, rigor and improvisational nature of science). And how much Fred contributed to a new understanding of understanding the world (not scientific, but not unscientific either).

What do I mean by that? Here’s the brief introduction I wrote to the revised (2010) edition of Fred Newman’s book, Let’s Develop! (It’s a great book!)

1994, the year that Let’s Develop! A Guide to Continuous Personal Growth was first published, was also the year that the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) came out. The contrast couldn’t be starker. Let’s Develop!, written by philosopher and lay therapist Fred Newman with the assistance of his friend, sociologist Phyllis Goldberg, is informed by hundreds of ordinary people, the clients he saw in his social therapy practice. Its subject matter is people and their emotions, their pain, their dreams, their relationships, their therapeutic conversations, and their activity of growing. DSM-IV, written under the auspices of the American Psychiatric Association, is informed by over 200 psychiatrists and psychologists (nearly half of whom had financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry). Its subject matter is 297 classified mental disorders, which serve as prototypes for judging patients’ symptoms and behaviors. When the DSM-IV came out there was minor protest, most of it around the pharmaceutical connections of the writers. In contrast, work on new edition due out in 2013 (referred to as DSM-5) is being carried out in a flurry of controversy over the even greater proliferation of mental disorders than with prior revisions.

Fred Newman thinks the DSM (all editions) is silly. Scientifically silly. Since he loves science and is quite knowledgable, his opinion on this carries some weight. If diagnose we must (and it’s not at all clear that we must), Newman says, then we should diagnose ourselves and each other, rather than take up the diagnoses of the so-called experts, people who don’t know us. Newman is one of many, many therapists, social scientists and philosophers who have written thoughtful and often scathing critiques of the medical model and pseudoscientific diagnostic approach to mental health and illness for academic books and journals. However, Newman is not primarily interested in critiquing; he’s interested in helping. Let’s Develop! is a self-help book, written for ordinary people. It’s an exceedingly practical book, which attempts to give the everyday usefulness of Newman’s social therapy to the average Joe and Jane. And precisely because it is so practical, I think it’s perhaps Newman’s most thoughtful and scathing critique. It is, to use a term Newman and I like very much, practical-critical.

In 1994 there was not all that much receptivity for the practical-critical from scholars. The divide between theoretical critique and alternative practice was great. Newman and I were emerging voices in the intellectual dialogues taking place on the unresolvable problems that arise from forcing human life into a natural science framework, and advocating for the creating of new psychologies. With Newman’s philosophical sophistication and my grounding in human development across the life span, we more than held our own. But it was our practice, in particular Newman’s social therapy practice, that set us apart as the most practically oriented of theoretical critiques. To make that statement loud and clear, we decided that Newman should write the practical guide that is Let’s Develop!

During the sixteen years since the book first appeared, the sharp distinction between critical intellectual debate and alternative practices in psychology and psychotherapy has begun to blur. New critical practices have developed and, like Newman’s social therapy, others have grown, and this has significantly advanced the overall substance and quality of the intellectual conversation. The debate continues, but critique and practice are now closer together.

If you’re not involved in these intellectual conversations, you might be wondering why you should care about this history and debate. Well, think about where your therapist, your child’s school counselor, your uncle’s addiction counselor or your mother’s social worker got her or his training. What were these professionals taught? How many different approaches were they exposed to? What understandings of how human beings grow and learn and feel and think do they work with? Do they think you and your family can grow emotionally, or do they think that all that can be done is modifying the most dysfunctional ways you all relate? Can they help you create your life (including your emotional life) or are they only concerned to treat the symptoms of your so-called mental disorder? The more that critical practice and theoretical critique intermingle, the more likely it is that the training future counselors and therapists receive will be broad and inclusive, and the answers to these questions will be thoughtful and rich with possibility.

Newman sees and does therapy as a creative activity, not as a medical procedure. Together, therapists and clients create the therapy—that’s how it works. He relates to people as creators of their development, no matter how severe their pain, “presenting problem” or psychiatric diagnosis. He never tries to fix a problem. Rather, he supports people to grow, to create their lives. There’s always a choice. Not as a denial of how one is, but as a loving act. Ask for help. Be giving. Share the shame. When a conversation is heading toward a screaming match, start it over again. Do something completely unlike you. You’ll still be “you” but it’ll be a you who’s actively becoming. Becoming what? Becoming you.

Newman’s social therapy is unique in its focus on people’s development, but it’s not alone in being humanistic and creative. This is good news for the growing masses of adults, children and families in need of help for whom the choices have been to “tough it out” without therapy or to be pathologized. Those who engage in social therapy or another of the dozens of alternative therapies that now exist are, by their very activity, critical psychologists as much, if not more, than their academic counterparts. Their voices, and those of their therapists, are slowly being heard in the seminar rooms and clinics that train tomorrow’s therapists and counselors.

It is in this revived playing field that we reissue Let’s Develop! Some slight changes have been made throughout the text to reflect life style changes that have occurred over the years but, overall, the content remains not only intact, but equally—if not more—relevant.

As a new reader of Let’s Develop!, you’ll be joining a global grouping of tens of thousands. Unlike most books, its following wasn’t built with advertising dollars or critical reviews, but by a community that it helped to grow through viral marketing. Across the US, social therapists gave it to clients, psychology professors to students, youth workers to urban teens, teacher trainers to school personnel, business coaches and consultants to executives. Colleagues of ours in other countries xeroxed chapters from their copies and handed them out to friends and family. Chapters were translated into different languages (the ones I know about are Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian and Spanish) and used in university courses. Zdravo da Ste, a community of hundreds devoted to human development in Serbia, translated the book in its entirety, found a publisher and promotes it throughout the country to both the public and professionals.

I’ve worked with Fred Newman for most of my adult life on many social change projects. But none has been as difficult or rewarding as working to liberate psychology from its own pathology. “You don’t have to be sick to get help,” Newman insists. That’s the practical-critical message of Let’s Develop! It’s critical psychology at its best. Welcome to the “grassroots” critical psychology movement!

Hundreds of messages are filling my inbox—outpourings of condolences, love and respect on the passing of Fred Newman. From all corners of the world those who studied with Fred, read one of our books, heard him speak in person or on video, or “met” him through others are writing to share their appreciation for all he has built. And share their stories—what they remember from an encounter, a life-changing therapeutic or performance experience, a radically re-orienting world view provocation. Reading these messages from so many friends and colleagues, and responding to them, is very moving. It’s as if societal time has momentarily stopped and I/we are world historical.

Fred’s life and accomplishments are noted in an official New York Times obituary that appeared this past weekend. It focuses on his influence on independent politics in the US and New York City politics overall. As you’ll see, the first line comments that Fred’s influence defies easy description. Fred would be gratified to read this, as he was very sceptical of the value of description, easy and otherwise, in the human social activity of creating a new world.

July 9, 2011

Fred Newman, Writer and Political Figure, Dies at 76

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Fred Newman’s influential role in New York life and politics defied easy description.

He founded a Marxist-Leninist party, fostered a sexually charged brand of psychotherapy, wrote controversial plays about race and managed the presidential campaign of Lenora Fulani, who was both the first woman and the first black candidate to get on the ballot in all 50 states.

He helped the Rev. Al Sharpton get on his feet as a public figure and gave Michael R. Bloomberg the support of his Independence Party in three mayoral elections, arguably providing Mr. Bloomberg’s margin of victory in 2001 and 2009.

Mr. Newman, who died at 76 in his Manhattan home on July 3, eschewed conventionality. He insisted, for instance, that there was nothing wrong with psychotherapists having sex with patients. He created an empire of nonprofit and for-profit enterprises, including arts groups and a public relations firm. He wrote books on psychology and philosophy as well as plays. One play, about the 1991 riots between blacks and Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, was condemned as anti-Semitic by the Anti-Defamation League.

His greatest impact came through mobilizing his followers, sometimes called “Newmanites,” to build alliances with third parties, including that of the Texas independent H. Ross Perot.

“If it weren’t for the Independence Party, Mike Bloomberg might not have become mayor,” said Douglas Muzzio, a professor of public affairs at Baruch College.

In turn, Mr. Bloomberg supported the Independence Party’s goal of nonpartisan municipal elections and gave the party more than $650,000 of his own money. His administration arranged millions of dollars in bond financing in 2002 and 2006 for a building for Mr. Newman’s nonprofit All Stars Project, which uses the performing arts to help low-income children.

Mr. Newman began his climb to influence in New York in the 1960s, when, from his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, he formed a Marxist collective called “If … Then.” Its members, many of them self-professed anarchists, collected money on the streets for the group. Most participated in Mr. Newman’s newly articulated “social therapy,” which encouraged patients to change themselves by seeking to change society. He encouraged collective members to sleep with one another, an activity he called “friendosexuality.” The collective published newspapers and started a dental clinic.

“It’s probably fair to say I was the dominant leader,” Mr. Newman said in an interview with The New York Observer in 1999. “I hope I wasn’t an authoritarian oppressor, but I think that’s probably accurate to say that.”

His detractors, however, said his “collective” amounted to a cult. Chip Berlet, a senior analyst with Political Research Associates, which studies unorthodox political groups, called Mr. Newman “a master at creating a myth of importance.” “He was a brilliant charlatan,” Mr. Berlet said.

Frederick Delano Newman was born in the Bronx on June 17, 1935, and grew up there. His mother chose the same middle name as that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a hero of hers. After his father died when young Fred was 9, his mother raised her five children alone, supported by welfare checks, the rent from rooms in her house, near Yankee Stadium, and the fees she earned running poker games.

Mr. Newman hated school but tested well enough to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He worked as a toolmaker to help support his family. At 19, he joined the Army and served in Korea. He graduated from the City College of New York and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford in 1962.

He was twice married and divorced. He is survived by his son, Donald; his daughter, Elizabeth Newman; and by Gabrielle L. Kurlander and Jacqueline Salit, his life partners in what Ms. Salit described as an “unconventional family of choice.” He died of renal failure, his spokeswoman, Christina DiChiara, said.

Mr. Newman taught at City College but was fired after giving male students A’s to help them avoid being drafted and sent to Vietnam. Other colleges hired him but fired him for the same reason. A job as a drug counselor led to his therapy career.

After forming his Upper West Side collective, Mr. Newman, in 1974, allied his group with Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., originally a leftist leader who veered to right-wing conspiracy theories and ran for president eight times from the political fringe. Tensions between the two prompted Mr. Newman to break the alliance after less than a year, however. He then formed the International Workers Party from what he called his core collective, with a mission to advance minority rights and a leftist agenda.

The party was dissolved at the end of the 1970s. Mr. Newman then founded the New Alliance Party as a vehicle for moving beyond a narrow leftist spectrum. Around the same time, he met Ms. Fulani, a graduate student who attended one of his clinics and joined the collective. Mr. Newman helped mold her into a political professional who for many years was the face of his political ventures.

“She is one of my life’s proudest accomplishments,” he told New York Newsday in 1992.

In 1988, as her campaign manager, he helped Ms. Fulani get on the presidential ballot in all 50 states, something no black candidate or woman had done. She received more than 200,000 votes. In 1992, Ms. Fulani ran again, and raised more than $2 million from private donors.

In 1991, the New Alliance Party gave strong support to Mr. Sharpton, then a community advocate, at a time when he was struggling for broader political recognition. It provided Mr. Sharpton with income, public relations help and up to half the participants in his demonstrations, often protesting attacks against blacks.

In the early 1990s, Mr. Newman began a campaign to encourage more independent voices in politics, almost regardless of ideology. These included Mr. Perot, Ralph Nader and even the conservative stalwart Patrick J. Buchanan. Mr. Newman supported a succession of reform parties, ultimately capturing control of the New York City branch of the Independence Party.

As late as 2005, Mr. Newman wrote that he remained a Marxist, albeit what he called a postmodern one. His final cause was to end the two-party system, which he believed stifled real choice. He wanted primary elections to be open to all parties, and to have all candidates run against one another. The top two would vie in a general election.

That proposal prompted a question from Mr. Bloomberg one day in 2001 when the future mayor was seeking Mr. Newman’s support, Ms. Salit recalled. Mr. Bloomberg asked him if he would be putting himself out of business if he were to give up the ballot line he had used so effectively.

“We’re an anti-party party,” Mr. Newman answered. “We want to be put out of business.”