Philosophy

09 Mar

Posted at 02:14h in Community Organizing, Creativity, Culture, Education, Human Development, Philosophy, Politics, Training/Classes, What's New

Earlier this evening I completed a six-day residency period of The International Class of the East Side Institute. It was an intense period of conversation on all manner of psychological, phiosophical, political, cultural and completely mundane matters. The 9 current members of this year's hail from 5 countries—Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, the Netherlands,...

12 Jan

Posted at 03:27h in Activity Theory, Creativity, Culture, Language, Philosophy, Popular Posts, Psychology of Becoming, Speaking Engagements

Here’s something I’ve been mulling over for a long time (decades!): the “blessing and the curse” that is human language. What an invention! Making sounds together creating meanings, meanings creating and shaping and reshaping perceptions, concepts, beliefs, feelings, relationships, images, imagination… What we have done and continue to do with, and...

11 Dec

Posted at 03:44h in Language, Philosophy, Psychology, Publications, Social Therapy, Vygotsky, What's New, Wittgenstein

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...

20 Sep

Posted at 18:26h in Activity Theory, Creativity, Culture, DSM-5, Human Development, Language, Philosophy, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapeutics, Social Therapy, Vygotsky

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...

25 Jul

Posted at 00:15h in Activity Theory, Culture, Education, Human Development, Language, Philosophy, Play, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Social Therapeutics, Vygotsky

  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....

11 Jul

Posted at 00:34h in Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Popular Posts, Psychology of Becoming

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...

29 May

Posted at 22:07h in Critical psychiatry, Culture, DSM-5, Human Development, Philosophy, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapy, Wittgenstein

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...

23 Apr

Posted at 17:30h in Community Organizing, Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodern Marxism, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapeutics, Social Therapy

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...