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Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy

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"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.

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.

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.

As a thirty year veteran social group worker specializing in positive youth development, I radically transformed my clinical practice, through training in the social therapy approach to human development and community.

Social group work, with its practice of forming homogeneous groups around a common presenting problem, its focus on stages of group development and group tasks was very helpful to me early in my career but of limited use in supporting inner city youth to develop in the context of a school-based mental health program.

Fred Newman looks at the world through a different lens. He does not see individuals, rather he sees groups. While he does not deny the existence of the individual, he sees the group as the fundamental unit of human development. This way of seeing has profound implications for practice. The group, not the individual, is the unit that learns and develops.

This passionate belief in a new way of thinking about what a group is has informed my practice as the director of an inner city high school mental health program, "Let's Talk About It."
Young people with a range of emotional and social problems are invited to become partners in creating their own mental health program. With a ten year track record of success, young people are becomming choicemakers as they graduate or tansfer to a new school to go on and take responsibility for their lives.

"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.

Psychological Investigations is a book not to be missed! Don't be fooled by the subtitle "Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy" this is a book for anyone who wants to transform their life!

Psychological Investigations gave me a bird's eye view of a therapeutic approach called "social therapy." As a long-time therapy patient of various disciplines, I was curious to know what makes it different from other approaches. It satisfied my curiosity by sharing actual conversations between the founder of social therapy Fred Newman, and therapists.

Based on the premise that "building the group" is the cure, social therapy is a methodology that goes against the individualistic pull of the world. But how does it work?
In the chapter called "Mundane Creativity" Newman talks about individuals in a therapy group coming together each week from all across the city...." people are exceedingly individuated; everyone has had a different week, and yet we come together as a group. The interesting and fascinating question is, what can we create together in order to make this therapy session a valuable event? What can we build?" That's the question, and from what I can tell, the answer is the cure!

--Melissa J. Meyer

As an early childhood educator and teacher trainer, I came away from "Psychological Investigations" with fresh new ways of thinking about my role as a teacher in the classroom. I found the book to be a practical, philosophical, and provocative look at development, play and groups and extremely pertinent to my work with young children and prospective teachers. It tackles some of the key questions facing educators-how do we create developmental learning environments? Why is play so critical to development? What is a group, and how do you work with a group? In his dialogues with students, Newman discusses challenging philosophical issues in a way that invites you into the conversation and allows you to grapple with questions practically and not abstractly.

As an early childhood educator and teacher trainer, I came away from "Psychological Investigations" with fresh new ways of thinking about my role as a teacher in the classroom. I found the book to be a practical, philosophical, and provocative look at development, play and groups and extremely pertinent to my work with young children and prospective teachers. It tackles some of the key questions facing educators-how do we create developmental learning environments? Why is play so critical to development? What is a group, and how do you work with a group? In his dialogues with students, Newman discusses challenging philosophical issues in a way that invites you into the conversation and allows you to grapple with questions practically and not abstractly.

As a sociologist, I've always thought that much of what's written about psychology is simple-minded...if not downright silly. Well, here at last is a psychology book that even sociologists can like! And for good reason: Fred Newman, the philosopher who is the founder of social therapy, the clinical approach under discussion in Psychological Investigations, rejects virtually all of psychology's most treasured (and scientifically questionable) notions -- even (gasp!) the self -- in favor of a social, dialectical, activity-centered understanding of human life. Having written two books with him, I'm happy to say that I now have a new favorite Newman book.

Psychological Investigations consists of a series of dialogues between Newman and practicing social therapists, therapists-in-training, and other participants in colloqiums and supervisory sessions, who ask him questions having to do with his theory and practice. In his responses to them, he touches on a wide variety of subjects, including alienation and humiliation, the oppression of identity, creativity as a collective impulse, and the limits of individual growth; what he has to say is sophisticated, provocative, and humane.

Here's an excerpt:

Newman: The notion that we discover who we are from
getting a deeper look at the component parts that
make us up is, in my opinion, a pernicious myth.
We aren't who we are. We are what it is that we are
continuously becoming. It's very easy to hear this
as...metaphorical. But metaphor is a relative
term...Ours is a culture of commodified "being" in
which "becoming" tends to be related to as a
metaphor, at best. What I try to do in my
therapeutic work is to help people to relate to
becoming not as a metaphor, but as activity...the
complex, ever-continuous social process that we are
all continuously involved in; I mean by it life.
Life is filled with things. but life itself is not
a thing...I have no interest in living my life as
if I were a thing, and I have no interest in
relating to other people as if they were things.