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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read for anyone interested in change, August 5, 2003
This review is from: Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy (Paperback)
"Psychological Investigations" is an adventure through uncharted psychological terrain. A sure-footed guide, Newman is far more interested in helping you make the most of the journey than he is getting you where you think you need to go. Whether pursuing issues of creativity, individuality, truth, knowledge, identity, group, crisis, health or alienation, his ability to play around with language and his passion for helping people to grow (even as he recognizes how difficult that is!) is lovingly captured in these conversations. A must read for anyone interested in change.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A fresh new look at creating transformative groups, September 3, 2003
This review is from: Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy (Paperback)
Much of the current writings in psychology and organizational development revolve around `positive psychology' and `emotional intelligence'. In this book, Fred Newman - the founder of social therapy - offers what I consider to be a more evolved, challenging and vital understanding of human/group activity. As a physician, group therapist and healthcare consultant, I firmly believe that this approach offers leaders, managers, practitioners and consultants in healthcare, education, business and politics an inspiring new approach to developing themselves and the people with whom they work. Edited by Dr. Newman's colleagues, Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez, "Psychological Investigations" is a book of dialogues between Fred Newman and his students (mostly therapists-in-training). Newman's postmodern words and vision are transformative. In keeping with this non-descriptive, non-objectifying, and non-assuming methodology for human growth and development, these dialogues are not talk about some thing as much as they are the thing itself - a performance of social therapy. One gets the sense in reading this book that Dr. Newman and his colleagues are creating social therapy right before our eyes. This, to my understanding, is the essence of this performatory methodology, which is not based on 'knowing' or an accumulation of knowledge but on creative, dialectic, group activity - building a group through the questioning and dialogic challenging of assumptions. A Stanford-trained philosopher, Newman draws heavily from the philosophic works of Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein and from the early 20th century developmental psychologist Lev Vgotsky. Newman's understandings resonate with the postmodern writings of Ken Gergen, Harlene Anderson and Richard Rorty. Those unfamiliar with Dr. Newman's previous books may wonder what a philosopher could teach us about `real' life - about human behavior, growth and development. In Part I, editors Lois Holzman and Raphael Mendez answer this question by providing the reader with the social, political, and intellectual history of Newman's development as the founder and leader of the social therapy movement. In particular, I find Lois Holzman's writings to represent the most cutting edge, uncompromising and intellectually rigorous thinking in the developmental psychology literature. In my opinion, Dr. Holzman is years ahead of her modernistic, behaviorally-oriented colleagues. I would highly recommend her articles and co-authored texts with Fred Newman to anyone who has a serious interest in human behavior in any context - be it organizational, family, education, therapy, corporate business, or politics - and to anyone who has a serious interest in their own growth and development.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Book for Oncology Social Workers!, September 18, 2003
As an oncology social worker, the social therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Fred Newman, informs my conversations with hundreds of people each month, as I help patients and families with cancer to live life fully, in the face of their fear and pain. A riveting and radical challenge to the basic assumptions of Western philosophy and psychology, Psychological Investigations is a series of supervisory conversations, set in a clear conceptual framework that therapists-in-training and experienced clinicians have with Fred Newman. Newman, a methodologist, psychotherapist and teacher extraordinaire, does not focus on individual problems and pathology. He provides no answers. Rather he invites those who study with him, as well as his readers, to engage in an unscientific, performatory investigation of human life. Dive in, he encourages, to a learning challenge that turns everything upside down - how we think about emotionality and truth, what a group is, how the activity of giving helps cancer patients, what it means to make demands on clients without being coercive, and much more. Get to know Fred Newman - his thinking, his values, his sensibilities, his capacity for intimacy in the service of human development. Psychological Investigations is a dialogic approach to the teaching of this radical social/cultural methodology that I think has the potential to take us out of the fly bottle of emotional pain and social crisis that pervades life in the 21st century. If you let yourself be touched, Psychological Investigations can impact profoundly on your therapeutic practice and your life. It is a must read for clinicians and healthcare professionals, students of philosophy, and anyone in despair about the social and moral crises of our times.
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