Psychology

20 Sep A Way to Develop Psychotherapy

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 0 Comments

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...

01 Aug Ideas Fast and Slow—And How to Spread Them

Posted at 21:16h in Community Organizing, Creativity, Culture, Health Care, Human Development, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming 5 Comments

August 1, 2013 About 3-4 months ago I started writing another blog on Psychology Today. I call it The Conceptual Revolution (The Creative Side of Culture Change). Usually I write different posts than what I write here. But today's an exception. Here's "How to Spread "Slow Ideas"—Talk to People." “Why do some...

25 Jul Vygotsky’s a Classic!

Posted at 00:15h in Activity Theory, Culture, Education, Human Development, Language, Philosophy, Play, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Social Therapeutics, Vygotsky 0 Comments

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....

23 Jul Are You a Performance Activist?

Posted at 15:31h in Applied Theatre, Community Organizing, Creativity, Culture, Human Development, Performance Movement, Play, Politics, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Theatre 1 Comment

July 23, 2013 Last month I spent my Wednesday evenings in conversation on the topic of “Performance Activism.” I was co-leading a short course in the East Side Institute’s Revolutionary Conversation series. My partner was Dan Friedman, who is a theatre historian, artistic director of the Castillo Theatre and, with me,...

07 May NIMH Wants to “Fail Better” than the DSM-5 Did

Posted at 00:12h in Critical psychiatry, DSM-5, Human Development, Politics, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming 11 Comments

May 6, 2013 I wonder why no major media outlet is covering this story—the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) announced on April 29, 2013 that it won’t be using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) anymore. (The story is all over the blogosphere, which is how I...

23 Apr Join the Social Therapeutics Conversation

Posted at 17:30h in Community Organizing, Culture, Human Development, Philosophy, Politics, Postmodern Marxism, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Social Therapeutics, Social Therapy 2 Comments

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...

10 Apr Avoiding the Social in Social Anxiety

Posted at 02:03h in Critical psychiatry, Human Development, Philosophy, Popular Posts, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy 14 Comments

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...

17 Mar Vygotsky—Closing the Cognition-Emotion Gap

Posted at 14:50h in Activity Theory, Creativity, Education, Human Development, Psychology, Psychology of Becoming, Psychotherapy, Vygotsky 11 Comments

March 17, 2013 Lev Vygotsky was a brilliant psychologist who lived and worked in the first decades of the Soviet Union. His writings and teachings—he began very young (when only 19) and died very young (when only 38)—have been inspiring and teaching psychologists and educators for many decades. His understanding of...