December 20, 2013 Ever since I heard long ago that “Eskimos have 100 words for snow” I’ve been fascinated by how we see, and the ways that our culture and language inter-relate with our perceptions. Never mind that the “words for snow” claim has been questioned and debated for more than...
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...
September 20, 2013 Although Vygotsky’s ideas are applied to dozens of disciplines/practices, psychotherapy is not among them. With few exceptions, contemporary Vygotskians have stayed clear of the sub- ject; and most psychotherapy researchers and clinical practitioners have little familiarity with Vygotsky—despite Vygotsky’s challenge to psychology’s isolation of the intellectual from the...
July 24 2013 Fred Newman's and my 1993 book, Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, is now a classic! It's been published by Psychology Press, and my copy arrived today in the mail. It felt good in my hands, and not just because it's a better size and paper quality than the original....
July 10, 2013 When I last posted on May 29, I had just returned from Denmark where I co-taught a three-day course, ”Educational Psychology, Late-modernity and Social Therapeutics,” for PhD students in psychology at the University of Aarhus (Denmark’s second largest city). Two days later, I left for Singapore where I...
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...
April 23, 2013 A few years ago while doing some teaching in Brazil, I was interviewed (in English) for Internet radio on where social therapeutics comes from and where it’s going. The interview was rich and far-reaching, as I recall—radical therapy, social constructionism, politics, philosophy, culture, community...
April 9, 2013 Joseph LeDoux’s opinion piece in The New York Times, “For the Anxious, Avoidance Can Have an Upside,” is an interesting essay that—like so many reports of neuroscience research in the mass media—miseducates the public. Here’s the formula, as I see it. Take a phenomenon of human social life—in this...
February 25, 2013 Last month I wrote and turned in to the publisher the Introduction to the Classic Edition for Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, which Fred Newman and I wrote twenty years ago. I'm happy that the book is in producction and will be released in the early fall of this year....
February 7, 2013 I just read an Opinionator piece in The New York Times on “Depression and the Limits of Psychiatry.” The author is Gary Gutting, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He tells us he’s been teaching a graduate seminar on Michel Foucault’s work and proceeds...
