The DSM-5 controversy continues, as more professionals and parents share their experiences and opinions regarding specific diagnostic changes and their impact on people’s lives. This is happening on the blogospere and in major media like The New York Times, which in the last ten days has had front page articles, op eds and letters on depression and ADHD and autism. 

The debate goes something like this: Fewer kids will get services if …; Medication is fine, but it’s not everything; But medication was a lifesaver for my kid; Is grieving a sign of depression? Always? If the criteria around grieving changes more people will be diagnosed with depression…and so on.

Lives are at stake, Long-term, no one knows the effects of the drugs that almost inevitably follow a diagnosis of, say, ADHD in a child. Short-term, parents and teachers want something to minimize the chaos they experience, whether that be a drug or special services their children become eligible for with a diagnosis. These are critically important practical policy issues.

But none of this has anything to do with science. The DSM-5 is not a scientific document. To portray it as one is a gigantic hoax. The debate that psychiatrists are having about this and that category of mental disorder is as scientific as a debate about how to classify the different languages spoken by aliens from space. They’re arguing about the very things they themselves made up! They’re debating the virtues of their map but they’re telling us they’re talking about our territory. Have they forgotten that what makes a map a map is the gap between it and the territory? Or are they deliberately disseminating misinformation to the public? Either way, it’s unethical (and takes a lot of chutzpah!).

Some of the experts now speaking say that the science has to get better, that we don’t yet know enough about the brain and biology. They’re just perpetuating the hoax. I’m all for discovering as much as we can about the brain. The men and women working in neuroscience are probably really good scientists—because their research doesn’t violate the brain. The brain is an organ and, from what I’ve read, it’s being studied in ways consistent with what an organ is.

But a person who doesn’t get out of bed? A 6 year-old boy who doesn’t sit still 6 hours a day? A 14 year-old girl who pulls her hair out? Each one of them has a brain, but they are not their brain. Their behavior, their emotional and relational lives, and their pain and distress are social, cultural activities that exist in the world. Relating to them as anything other than this is unscientific.

The notion of science I’m invoking is that it’s an exploratory enterprise that doesn’t violate the integrity of the thing being explored. Diagnosing “mental disorders” in human beings is both a scientific and a moral violation.

So let’s have some honesty in the DSM-5 debate. When it comes to emotional pain, science-talk doesn’t cure. But it does procure.

Here’s some other voices speaking about the DSM-5.

First, Dr. Anthony Rao. Tony is a pediatric psychologist, founder of Behavioral Solutions in Lexington MA, and author of The Way of Boys: Promoting the Social and Emotional Development of Young Boys. I met Tony in 2010 when I interviewed him and Christine LaCerva, director of the Social Therapy Group and of clinical training at the East Side Institute, on the topic, “Breakthroughs in Child Psychology” (view on You Tube). Both Tony and Christine work with children diagnosed with ADHD, autism and Asperger’s and, while one practices cognitive behavioral therapy and the other social therapy, we discovered in the interview how much they shared. Tony recently appeared on Boston TV commenting on the DSM-5. Here’s the video clip.

I also heard from Sami Timimi, a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist and Director of Postgraduate Education in the National Health Service in Lincolnshire, UK. He told me about a campaign he launched a few months ago—“No More Psychiatric Labels.” It’s an interesting read, especially refreshing coming from a psychiatrist. Here’s the concluding paragraph:

By lazily importing the diagnostic model from general medicine we end up miss-selling and under-utilising the unique skills the profession of psychiatry brings to healthcare by the ‘dumbing down’ of what we do into simplistic diagnosis driven protocols that has more to do with successful consumer culture marketing than science. Changing to more evidence compatible paradigms is now long overdue.

I’m glad to be introduced to Dr. Timimi, who has written several books on critical psychiatry that I plan to mull over.

A friend sent me a link to the Association for Women in Psychology information on “Bias in Psychiatric Diagnosis: Concerns about DSM-V” complete with petitions. I plan to read up on this initiative.

Please let me and my readers know of others saying interesting things!

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.

What is relationality and how does it play out in psychotherapy these days? Are all therapies relational? Or at least all non-medical model therapies? What challenges do relational therapists confront?

A communication from a therapist in Norway sparked these questions for me. I have the privilege of lurking in an online course the East Side Institute is currently running—“Helping Clients Discover the Other: A Clinician’s Guide to Social Therapy.” (The course is taught by my dear friend and colleague Christine la Cerva, a gifted and very creative therapist, director of the Social Therapy Group and the Institute’s clinical training programs; you can check out her newsletter, The Community Therapist.) In response to Christine’s first post and invitation to the 20 participants to introduce themselves and share how a deeply-held assumption was challenged in their lives, Paul writes of his history of professional training, his attraction to relational approaches as doing away with the imposition of the therapist’s authority, and the challenge  that social therapy’s radical relationality presents to his practice. I think Paul’s story (excerpts below, with his permission) not only encapsulates a journey he and many others are making, but also begins an exploration of a critically important ethical and methodological issue that psychotherapy needs to confront.

I live in Oslo, Norway. I work as a psychologist and for two years I lived in NYC and trained with the East Side Institute. ?At the time I moved to NYC in 2004, I was only a few years out of school, and heavily influenced by the diverse therapies coming out of family therapy that had developed from the 60s to the 90s from an interest in cybernetics, epistemology and into social constructionism and postmodernism. My orientation towards these therapies had much to do with a strong reaction against what I then understood to be a psychodynamic/analytic orientation to therapy and how it was built to position the therapist as an impenetrable Knower to manage the patient as a confused knot of uncontrollable and multiplying transference symptoms. Colonizing, imposing and thus hurtful to its patients.

I realize that there are friendlier and probably helpful versions of this, especially for the competent and affluent. But throughout many years of the student work I did in different institutions and clinics, the ruling and psychodynamic view of patients and their symptoms was almost always paired with a modernist interpretive stance toward patients’ lives and symptoms, often made by therapists who did not themselves see the patients, and who presented their judgements as truth. These very, very small versions of these persons (patients) became their totality, and had very real and shocking effects on the treatment, developments, lives and deaths of these people.

So I fell in love with the progressive therapies that seemed to develop responses and alternatives to that psychology, through slogans such as “the client as the expert” and methodological orientations such as “the not knowing stance.”

I think I became allergic to imposition. And in my assumptions, I thought I knew a lot about the million ways of imposing on other people’s lives, and the way to counteract them. One of my versions was to become a therapist of lightness, to aim to leave no trace, and the method would ideally be: ”a tap on the client’s shoulder… for the client to re-orient (in what I did not need to know nor impose on) and know how to go on.”

I was perhaps a friendly ghost.

Then I came to the East Side Institute and met social therapy and radical relationality.?And my assumption that not imposing, colonizing, or hurting other people in therapy was the invention, preparation and solo work of the therapist was strongly challenged!

I was told that this was impossible. That I could not by myself decide that authority was no longer an issue. I could not throw all the cultural commodities of possible imposition out of the therapy room before the client enters. We would have to build something together, from what we had to build with, that might or might not transform or challenge the imposition at hand. We might not even have what we would need to begin that work.

 

 

Please check out the latest issue of the East Side Institute’s newsletter, Reports from the Field, for news on what our friends, colleagues and alumni are up to. You’ll hear from Annalie Pistorius and her new social therapy practice in Pretoria South Africa, the synergy between Elina Lampert-Shepel and Brazilian educators at a Vygotsky research conference, and much more.

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’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.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fred Newman and I have written quite a bit about the specific ways that Ludwig Wittgenstein has influenced the social therapeutic practice and our understanding and articulation of the practice. As I teach a course/lead a conversation, “The Thought Leadership of Fred Newman,” these past three weeks (as part of the process of writing a new book), I am finding the responses to Newman’s and my writing very helpful. And that doesn’t apply only to the responses of the participants, but also to my own! I imagine other authors have similar experiences of reading something you wrote and feeling simultaneously the closeness of the writer and the distance of the reader. I find it a strangely pleasant disconcerting experience.

Here’s a passage from our book Unscientific Psychology: A Cultural-Performatory Approach to Understanding Human Life that participants grappled and/or resonated with (and which I am quite fond of):

[Wittgenstein’s] self-appointed task was to cure philosophy of its illness.  (Ours, as we will try to show, is closer to curing “illness” of its philosophy.)  We are all sick people, says Wittgenstein.  No small part of what makes us sick is how we think (related in complicated ways to what we think and, even more fundamentally, to that we think or whether we think), especially how (that or whether) we think about thinking and other so-called mental processes and/or objects–something which we (the authors) think we (members of our culture) do much more than many of us like to think! It gets us into intellectual-emotional muddles, confusions, traps, narrow spaces; it torments and bewilders us; it gives us “mental cramps.”  We seek causes, correspondences, rules, parallels, generalities, theories, interpretations, explanations for our thoughts, words and verbal deeds (often, even when we are not trying to or trying not to).  But what if, Wittgenstein asks, there are none?

For centuries, great and not so great philosophers have tried to understand the mystery of thinking and, thereby, for some of them, resolve the “mind-body problem.” I’m glad of their continued efforts and wish them well. But I am equally if not more glad of—and thankful for—the many chances I and my colleagues have to involve ordinary folks (non-philosophers) from all walks of life in such conversations. We learned this from Newman, whose passion for philosophy is inseparable from his passion for changing the world, the synthesis embodied in his practice and, occasionally, in the written word: “Abstraction is something that is dangerous unless it is engaged in by the masses. I think abstraction is not simply something that CAN be done by the masses. I think it is a critical developmental activity for the masses to engage in.” (Psychological Investigations)