Twenty-five years have passed since my friend, mentor and intellectual partner Fred Newman made what I think is one of the most significant statements about community I’ve ever heard. It was a cold November evening in 1990 and Fred was speaking to a hundred or so New Yorkers gathered in...
I few months ago I was invited to write a chapter for a book being published on the topic of critical psychotherapy, counseling and psychoanalysis. I’ve begun working on it this week and am at that early stage in writing (for me) where something is emerging, but I don’t know...
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...
December 1, 2013 Los Más Grandes Mitos Acerca de las Emociones & Como Debilitarlos ¿Donde viven las emociones? La respuesta te puede sorprender. (translated by Sandra Paola Lopez: "The Biggest Myths about Emotions and How to Weaken Their Grip") Con toda esta cháchara acerca de las emociones y el cerebro, usted podrá pensar que...
August 23, 2013 I’ve spent much of today gathering and reading bits of articles on imagination, play and creativity. Among them is a piece by Lev Vygotsky entitled, “Imagination and Creativity in Childhood”(translated into English from the Russian and published in 2004 in the Journal of Russian and East European Psychology)....
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...
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...
May 31,2012 For the past three Tuesday evenings, I’ve been leading “Making a Conceptual Revolution: The Practical-Critical Philosophy of Fred Newman”—an offering in the Institute’s Revolutionary Conversations series. It’s been delightful spending time with 30+ people from varied walks of life and varied levels of familiarity with Newman and his work...
April 24, 2012 I survived— and thrived at—TEDMED at the beautiful Kennedy Center in Washington, DC two weeks ago. Survived being with 1500 people I didn’t know and who didn’t come with an interest in mental health, diagnosis or the politics of psychology and psychiatry. Thrived on hearing 70 or more...
October 26, 2011 Question: What's it like to participate in an academic conference taking place in China and on the topic of contemporary capitalism? Answer: An academic conference. Which is to say that you have to do the work to create human connection/conversation outside the rigid conference structure of one person after another...