About Me

A More or Less Official Bio

Lois Holzman received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology and psycholinguistics from Columbia University.  Lois founded the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy in the 1980s with philosopher, therapist and activist Fred Lois Holzman received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology and psycholinguistics from Columbia University.  Lois founded the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy in the 1980s with philosopher, therapist and activist Fred Newman. She is its current director. With Newman, she developed Social Therapeutics as a methodology in which human development and community development are inseparable, and linked to play, performance and practical philosophy. The Institute has grown into an international educational, training and research center for Social Therapeutics and other alternatives to the natural science-medical model of psychology, psychotherapy and education, and to the ideologically-driven and reactive approaches to cultural change and social activism.

Lois is also a founder and the chair of the biennial Performing the World conferences, which support the emerging social change approach known as performance activism. As a leading proponent of postmodern, activity-theoretic, cultural approaches to human learning and development, she has brought the ideas of Lev Vygotsky to the fields of psychotherapy, organizational and community development, in addition to their traditional location with education.

Long a critic of the medical model of mental health and the development of a non-medicalized group approach known as Social Therapy, Lois participates in diverse national and international activities advocating for alternatives to current diagnostic systems of mental illness. She is also a voice in the current conversation about the failure of modernist epistemology (“the knowing paradigm”) and the development of alternative ways to be in and relate to the world.

Her teaching, research and writing have developed in tandem with and in service to her community organizing work. Over forty years Lois has built and led grassroots organizations that are engaging poverty and underdevelopment utilizing the transformative power of performance. She is mentor and coach to hundreds of scholars, educators, artists and community activists around the globe, and, along with them, she is helping to usher in performance activism as a new approach to community development and social change.

She lives her life as an activist who uses her academic background and experience to organize people—as individuals and communities—to participate in creating their development and in so doing, to create hope and new possibilities. This involves her in building partnerships that bring the best of grassroots practices into conversation with the most innovative of academic scholarship, and giving support to community educators and activists worldwide in their efforts to make the world more humane through a variety of international programs.

Lois is the author/editor of ten books and dozens of chapters and articles. She blogs at loisholzman.org; A Conceptual Revolution at Psychology Today; and Mad in America. She lives in New York City and can be reached at lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org.

What I Do

As someone associated with performative psychology and performance activism, I frequently get asked,” Are you a performer? Do you have a theatre background? Have you acted on the stage?” I respond, in order, “Yes. No. Only once or twice.”  Yes, I’m a performer because, like everyone, I have the capacity to pretend and to play, to be me and not me at the same time. Like actors on the theatrical stage, we all can perform other than who we are. Not only can we, we must or else we would not ever learn anything or grow up. For performing as other than who they are is what babies do. They perform as speakers before they know how to speak. We encourage them. We pretend they are making sense. We pretend they understand what we are saying. And by playing this way, performing this way, pretending this way, they become speakers. And much else!

All of the work that I do is based in this understanding of performance: we develop and learn when we are allowed to perform, when others relate to us—and we learn to relate to ourselves and others—as simultaneously who we are and other than who we are.

I was trained as a linguist and developmental psychologist. I loved doing research but the more I got into it, the more critical I was of what was deemed “good research.” (It meant putting people in artificial situations in a laboratory and testing their ability for one thing or another.) I quickly came to dislike the know-it-all posture of traditional social science and to distrust its methods of investigation. I was fortunate to be in environments with people who were not just disgruntled like me, but who were trying out new methods of studying people and employing new conceptions of what it means to be human and to learn and to develop. Early on, these were university environments—Columbia University and the Rockefeller University. Later, the environment was a unique independent “grassroots think tank/do tank”—the East Side Institute—and the loose network of other organizations and individuals the Institute is a part of known as “the development community.”

For what’s now nearly all of my adult life, building a global development community, creating a new psychology based in performance, finding and supporting grassroots performance activists, and transforming the best ideas from the academy into practical tools for ordinary people has been my work and joy.

My Mentors

All of us have mentors—those important people in our lives who we believe helped shape who we are and are becoming. I’d like to tell you about four of mine.

My first mentor was Lois Bloom, a researcher and teacher who I worked with in the mid 1970s when I was a graduate student in the developmental psychology program at Columbia University. Lois taught me that to learn how children learn to speak and develop language we had to leave the laboratory and go into their homes and play groups.  We had to spend time with toddlers, playing with them, talking with them, performing with them.  I learned that context matters, that children don’t do the same things in a laboratory that they do at home, that their talk is coordinated with what they are doing and who and what they are doing it with. I learned from working with Lois that qualitative research can be as rigorous—indeed, more rigorous—than quantitative research. Lois helped me to love research. She projected me out of the lab, and that has been the foundation of everything I have done since.

My second mentor, with whom I did post-doctoral work at Rockefeller University in the late 1970’s, was Michael Cole. Mike taught me that laboratory experiments on human cognition cannot be ecologically valid because you can’t see the social-cultural nature of cognition in the lab. He also was the first person to make me aware that science in general, and the social sciences and psychology in particular, are political and that the research we psychologists do can be practically relevant. And Mike introduced me to that very practical and very political social scientist, Lev Vygotsky. Both of those introductions—to Vygotsky and to the political nature of psychology—set the stage for my third mentor, Fred Newman.

I met Fred when I was completing my dissertation and beginning to work with Cole. Fred was a philosopher who had left academia during the late 1960s to do political and community organizing. He also had created a radical type of therapy, social therapy, informed by his background in philosophy of science and Marxism. Fred taught me many things through the decades of our continuous collaboration. One thing he did was give me a way into the world.  Lois Bloom and Mike Cole both encouraged me to leave the laboratory. But while we may have been sitting in a playroom or family living room instead of a university lab, we brought the experimental mindset and method of the laboratory with us. What Fred showed me was a way to take the lab out of life. He invited me to develop a way to study the world through actively engaging in changing it. With Fred, I came to realize that my passion for human development came not just from intellectual curiosity but also from my belief that human beings must find a way to develop if our species is to survive and thrive, and from my desire to contribute to this revolutionary activity.

Working with Fred for 35 years not only transformed what I do; it transformed who I am. I feel I am a better scientist for being a builder and co-creator of what I study, a better researcher for getting the laboratory out of life. What I learned with Bloom and Cole—the socio-cultural situatedness of learning and development, the need for psychology to be ecologically valid, the political nature of psychology, the contemporary significance of Lev Vygotsky—has been deepened and developed by virtue of being taken out of academia and brought into the lives of ordinary people.

My fourth mentor wasn’t an individual. It was, and remains, the thousands of people who I’ve worked with over the decades building independent development activities and organizations. There’s the 8 year-old boy labeled autistic who became a co-therapist of a social therapy group. When the group ended he told the members, “I like that I can help people. I am no longer focusing on my problems. I like that. A way I could describe how the group has helped me is it has helped me live my life.” There’s the 65-year-old retired health care worker who had given up her dream to be writer decades earlier when she had to support and raise a disabled daughter. She literally wept when she realized she could take a playwriting workshop for free at the All Stars Project’s UX—and who went on to write a play about her teenage years in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There’s s the 17-year-old tough teenager from the South Bronx who learned improvisation in Youth Onstage! and began to teach his friends to say “Yes/And” to whatever offers, however unwelcome, life dealt them in order to get beyond complaining to creating new possibilities. There’s the New York City police officers who through the Operation Conversation: Cops and Kids program play theatre games and improvise silly skits with poor young people of color as a means of creating an atmosphere where the cops and kids can actually have a meaningful and growthful conversation. There is the head of a major American oil fortune who gave $10 to one of our organizers on the street in the early 1990s and went on to become an influential advocate of our performance approach to development and to donate over $2 million to our organizing efforts. There are the academics and practitioners in Sao Paulo Brazil, Tokyo Japan, Dhaka Bangladesh, Pretoria South Africa, Belgrade Serbia, and London England who have been inspired to start organizing developmental activities in the poor communities in their cities. There are the hundreds of educators, youth workers, medical and mental health people who have studied with me over the years. Like Peter Nsubuga from Uganda who started a village school outside Kampala knowing only that the children weren’t developing, and how he, his program and his community have grown into practitioners of developmental performance. Like Ishita Sanyal and Prativa Sengupta, two Indian psychologists working in different ways with the mentally ill, who wanted at first to only restore to them some dignity and meaningful activity, but who came to experience the far greater potential of relating to these people in emotional distress as active creators and performers of their lives. Like Miguel Cortes and Jorge Burciaga in Cuidad Juárez Mexico, one of the most violent cities in the world, who opened the Fred Newman Center and organize and support people to transform the emotionality of fear into one of hope.

These individuals and countless others have taught me so much about the development that comes from diverse people self-organizing new activities and building new organizations in response to what they want and need. What I have learned from my fourth mentor could not have been learned had I remained exclusively within the university system, because what we have built could not have been created there. My first two mentors came from the academy. My third, Fred Newman, came from the university and showed me, through example, the importance of taking the most advanced ideas and discoveries of the university to diverse communities of ordinary people. The most valuable thing I think I’ve done is to become an activist-scholar in an ongoing creative activity that is crossing the borders of nations, classes, cultures and ideologies and impacting on the development of thousands of individuals and hundreds of communities all over the world.