By Lois Holzman

To appear in: Narrative Identities, Psychologists Engaged in Self-Construction
George Yancy and Susan Hadley, Editors

I grew up in a silent house. No one talked much in my family. My mother and father
didn’t gossip about their co-workers or the neighbors, recite the little successes and
failures of their day, give voice to their dreams, or ask my sister, my brother and me,
“How was school today?” Ours wasn’t a tense silence of things unsaid, of anger or love
repressed. It was just how we were together.

My mother had seven sisters and brothers and, until my teens, the families would get
together a lot. In these gatherings, we all held our own in constant chatter. When visiting
my friends for play or a sleepover, I was no more or less talkative than any one else. I
was fascinated, though, that they and their mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers
talked so much to each other.

Since we didn’t talk much, my family didn’t have many stories. Not even the coming to
America of my Russian-Jewish immigrant grandparents, or how my parents met, or the
story of my birth. So it’s kind of funny to me that one of the few stories, repeated often,
was that I didn’t talk until I was three. Actually, it was hardly a story. It was merely a
statement—not followed by, “and she hasn’t stopped talking since” or “and see how
smart she is” or anything. It was up to the listener to fill in the next line.

I tell this story in that same spirit—leaving it to the reader to continue it, or not. I find it
interesting to reflect on my family’s relationship to language in light of my love of words
and over thirty year inquiry into speaking and thinking, but I draw no connections—
causal or otherwise. Both are, simply, who I am/am becoming.

I knew when I accepted George Yancy’s invitation to participate in this volume that
doing so would take me to new places philosophically, psychologically and linguistically.
I was excited by the journey I would create in writing this chapter (and flattered at being
asked). I did wonder, though, if it was dishonest or at least disingenuous to agree to
“narrate my identity” and engage in “self-construction” when I don’t believe in either
identity or self! George made it clear from our very first correspondence that he was
aware of the paradoxical nature of his invitation to me; had he not, I suspect I would have
declined.

So, here I am, having told one little story and then another. I am trying to embrace the
paradox of my task through creating stories of the people and events and ideas that
“shaped” me, rather than telling my story. There is no such thing as my story. This is our
story.

Fred Newman, my dear friend, mentor and collaborator for nearly thirty years (you can
call him a major influence on me, as long as you don’t turn him into an explanation),
recently read me an essay he was writing. In it, Fred says he wound up at Stanford
University’s Ph.D. program in philosophy by accident. (That’s part of the story he tells.
And it’s part of the one I’m telling too—the story of how I wound up devoting my life to
changing the world.)

I wound up with a Ph.D. in psychology more by default than accident. I think I wanted to
be a writer as a child and teenager. I wasn’t burning with things I wanted to say, but I
very much liked the activity and accoutrements of writing. When my mother took me to
work with her when I was little, I would gather cardboard, paper, scissors, staples and
glue and construct books and newspapers and magazines. Occasionally I would write
something in them, but mostly I left them blank. Throughout school I was a serious and
good student; I especially liked literature and writing, but I adored geometry and
grammar (I kept this latter proclivity to myself, so as not to appear too weird). To me,
constructing and deconstructing proofs and sentences was fun and creative.

Like most of my friends I was bored with school by the time I was a junior in high
school. But I had the support of my best friend who wanted to do more than complain and
waste a year of our lives. In the early spring, she and I decided that we would figure out
how to graduate without having to do our senior year. We succeeded by convincing the
principal to let us go to summer school and take the required Regents subjects and exams.
My friend knew she wanted to study art and had already picked out her school. I just
wanted to leave high school. I went to a College Night at the high school and picked up
brochures. I drooled over images of artsy Bennington College but knew it was financially
out of the question and that if my family could afford anything it would be a state school.
At the State University of New York table there was information about a small college in
Binghamton that had recently become part of the state system. Harpur College was the
place, the woman at the table told me, for kids who get into Cornell but can’t afford it. I
liked that, and the fact that it had fewer than 2000 students and no fraternities or football
team. I presented my parents with my plan to leave school and go to college pretty much
as a fait accompli. At first shocked, they were soon won over to the reasonableness of
what I was proposing. Perhaps they were relieved that I took care of this myself, for they
knew nothing about how to find a college or apply to one; neither of them, nor my older
sister or brother had gone to college and, sensing that I wanted to, they might have been
anxious about how they could help.

I declared psychology as my major. I didn’t know what psychologists did. I didn’t
associate psychology with therapy (of which I was completely ignorant) or helping
people (which I hadn’t ever been particularly interested in). I must have gotten the notion
that psychology had something to do with the mind and would be a pretty interesting
intellectual pursuit. Or maybe it sounded glamorous. But my encounter with psychology
at Harpur College was neither intellectually interesting (large lecture courses and
multiple choice exams on classical and operant conditioning) nor glamorous (my very
own rat in a Skinner box). And so it was short-lived—but nonetheless vital in my
becoming. It generated a healthy skepticism toward social science experimentation, a

I declared psychology as my major. I didn’t know what psychologists did. I didn’t
associate psychology with therapy (of which I was completely ignorant) or helping
people (which I hadn’t ever been particularly interested in). I must have gotten the notion
that psychology had something to do with the mind and would be a pretty interesting
intellectual pursuit. Or maybe it sounded glamorous. But my encounter with psychology
at Harpur College was neither intellectually interesting (large lecture courses and
multiple choice exams on classical and operant conditioning) nor glamorous (my very
own rat in a Skinner box). And so it was short-lived—but nonetheless vital in my
becoming. It generated a healthy skepticism toward social science experimentation, a

passionate dislike for what I now refer to as pseudoscience, and an emerging interest in
methodological questions of how to study life-as-lived.

It also was the occasion for my first adult love affair. In that cavernous hall where Psych
101 lectures were held, students were seated alphabetically by last name. To the right of
Holzman (me) was Hood (a junior transfer student), the person on my left long forgotten.
We listened to the professor and studied together that semester. He loved the course, and
came to love experimental psychology and me. At the end of my sophomore and his
senior year we moved to Providence RI where he began Brown’s Ph.D. program in
psychology and I transferred to the local state college, majoring in English. (We married
a year later when I was twenty and lived our lives together for ten years.)

Almost immediately I found myself with an identity—graduate student wife. And I didn’t
like it at all. Graduate student (and faculty) wives had jobs; they were social workers and
nurses and teachers. But graduate students (and faculty) had passions and intellectual
pursuits and important work to do; they were scientists and writers and discoverers. If I
had to have an identity, that was the one I wanted!

As I write, I realize that I am creating myself as I write. I am creating stories of a me with
a disposition toward postmodernism. I feel pleased with this discovery and process.
From as far back as I can remember there are a few things I never believed in—Santa
Claus, god, an innate human nature and an inner life (obviously, these last two I didn’t
have terms for right away). It wasn’t that I thought a lot about their existence—weighing
the evidence on both sides and reaching a conclusion—or went through any kind of
philosophical or soul-searching process. I simply didn’t believe. Even though I now live
my life in the continuous activity of philosophizing, neither doubt nor certainty plays a
role in my thinking about such matters. When I was young and unschooled,
accompanying my “non-doubting – non-certain” not believing was an inability to
understand how others could believe in such things, and a kind of acceptance of that fact
of difference rather than a desire to debate or convince anyone to change their mind. And
today, while I love to explore with people how all sorts of things (including people’s
beliefs) came to be and am enriched by that activity, I still am no closer to understanding
how it is that they believe (any more than I understand how it is that I believe). I’ve come
to appreciate (believe?) that seeking such understanding is seeking an explanation by
another name. I also think it’s a misguided illusion born of our culture’s cognitively
biased understanding of understanding.

Sheila McNamee and Kenneth Gergen have spoken, and invited others to speak with
them, on the subject of relational responsibility (McNamee, Gergen and Associates,
1999). At the beginning of their book, relational responsibility is put forth as a discursive
reaction to the “deeply flawed” and “long-standing tradition” of placing individual blame.
However, by the book’s end the concept becomes more inclusive, largely due to their
dialogic partners who suggest such terms as relational responsiveness, relational

appreciation and relational resonance. Relational responsiveness (a contribution from
John Shotter and Arlene Katz) is the one that speaks to me.

In terms of my life, from quite a young age I think I had some sense that who-and-how I
was couldn’t be separated from context. I was keenly aware of how different I was
depending on where I was. It was in my late teens that I began to articulate this (to
myself). Going from high school to college was a shock—and a catalyst for questioning:
I went from “being” a smart kid to “being” pretty average. I found this fascinating! How
could that be? Which was I, smart or average? How would I know? How would people
decide? Was there such a thing as smartness? Was there a me independent of other
people and places?

I couldn’t see any evidence for it. Me-and-the-environment were partners, like it or not.
Sometimes we were good partners and sometimes we were not so good partners. Putting
a contemporary philosophical-psychological spin (of which I had no inkling of at the
time) on my teenage musings, I was questioning isolated individualism, identity, a core
self, essences, duality. And perhaps I was discovering relational responsiveness.
In terms of the development of my psychological perspective and practice, the issue of
context, environment and relationality loomed large. From descriptive linguistics to
sociolinguistics and developmental psycholinguistics, from Piagetian developmental
theory to Vygotsky’s socio-cultural activity theory, from an ecologically valid
psychology to social therapy, from mentors Lois Bloom to Michael Cole to Fred
Newman—I investigated self and other/person and environment. Today I am wary of the
concept of “context” as subtextually implying a separateness from what is (presumably)
“in” it, for I now see person-and-environment as historically and radically monistic.

In 1976 a new friend invited me to a series of lectures on “Marxism and Mental Illness.” I
liked this new friend of mine; he was unlike any one I ever knew. He was “political.” He
did something he called community organizing. He walked through the subway cars of
New York City selling a left newspaper. He stood on street corners and stopped people to
talk about the current fiscal crisis and ask them to help support the building of an
independent union for people who were on welfare or unemployed. He read Marx and
Lenin and Mao and also many others I hadn’t heard of (I had barely heard of those three).
He wanted to know what I thought about what was going on in the city, the country and
the world. He wanted me to meet the person who taught him, the man whom he followed,
the guy who was giving these lectures. Of course I went.

Having had no experience with the Left, never having read Marx and knowing virtually
nothing about mental illness (despite having a Ph.D.), I had no expectations walking into
the impressive Ethical Culture Society building on Central Park West (really none, as I
didn’t know what Ethical Culture was either). The hundred or so folding chairs were
nearly all filled, mostly with people in their 20s and 30s. Fred Newman took the
microphone and began to speak. He was large and loud. He was eloquent and erudite and
funny. He spoke like I imagined union men to talk one minute and like I knew
intellectuals to talk the next. I listened to him speak about economics, capitalism, Freud

the ego, the working class, science, Marx, Quine, power and authority—all new to
me—and the mind, language, Chomsky, Skinner and Goffman—which I was familiar
with. He described a new kind of radical therapy he was developing called social therapy.
What kept me spellbound as much as trying to follow the very sophisticated content was
how passionate Fred was as he gave expression to both his politics and his intellect. In
the discussion period after the formal talk, I asked him questions about things I knew
about. I was probably testing him, and if I had asked about something I knew nothing
about I wouldn’t have a way of judging his answers. Fred passed my test and I signed up
for a six-week seminar with him entitled, “The Crisis in Science and Society.” I was sure
he was someone I could learn a lot from. I responded to his style; I liked how he thought
(to the extent that I could tell, given that what he was talking about was so over my
head); and I resonated to his general topic (how the world got into the mess it was in and
how to change it).

That resonance didn’t surprise me, despite never before having been in a conversation
about it with anyone (including myself). I wouldn’t have known that I wanted to change
the world, that I was in agreement with Fred’s and my new friend’s political views, or
that I would choose to become a political activist and participate in creating a
revolutionary method. I wasn’t searching. It wasn’t, “Here’s what I’ve been looking for!”
It was, “This makes sense; it seems like a way to live my life.” From my current
philosophical-psychological perspective, I’d say it was a Vygotskian completion of my
thinking.

Lev Vygotsky is my closest dead friend. I’ve been talking to him for years. Early in my
relationship with Fred, I would talk to him about Vygotsky, but in the early 90s, the three
of us got together. Completion played a big role in that. It’s a long story.

Before I met Fred, I thought little about therapy—and even less of it. My disinterest
wasn’t born of experience (for I had none) but came from skepticism toward what I took
to be its premise—that an explanation or interpretation for how you were feeling could
change how you were feeling. On his part, Fred’s study of philosophy of science and
foundations of mathematics at Stanford had led him to reject therapy’s premises and
major conceptions—explanation, interpretation, the notion of an inner self that therapist
and client needed to go deeply into, and other dualistic and otherwise problematic
conceptions.

So it was a big surprise to him when, in the late 1960s Fred went into therapy and found
it incredibly helpful. As he tells the story, this experience raised a contradiction for him:
“It never occurred to me that some of the attitudes and beliefs I had about what I took to
be some of the mythic and irrational qualities of therapy were inaccurate. But it didn't
make sense that therapy should work; it didn't make sense that it should be so successful.
So I had to deal with the fact that therapy is of incredible value to lots of people, and the
question that kept occurring to me was, ‘How in the hell could this thing possibly
work?’” (Newman, 1999a, talk entitled “Therapeutics as a Way of Life.”)

As Fred initially developed it and has it has emerged over thirty years, social therapy is a
method of helping people with whatever emotional pain they are experiencing without
diagnosing their problem, analyzing their childhood, or interpreting their current life. Its
effectiveness must have something to do with what people were doing together in
therapy, he reasoned.

All during the 80s Fred and I talked about this. What was going on in social therapy?
What were people doing together? How was it the case that they not only were feeling
better but were, by their own admission and apparent to others, growing emotionally?
Social therapy clients work in groups whose explicit task is to create an environment in
which they can get help—to “grow the group”—because in that activity everyone can
develop emotionally. This emphasis on the group activity of creating the environments in
which people can give expression to their emotional life challenges the notion of an
individuated, isolated and internal life.

It was Vygotsky who helped us see that social therapy was a unique kind of tool for
emotional growth that had everything to do with the dialectical socialness of speaking.
One statement of his, in particular, seemed remarkable:

The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the
entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological
activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product,
the tool and the result of the study. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 65)

Here was an entirely new way of understanding method as something to be practiced, not
thought up and then applied to “real life.” From as far back as 1979, Fred and I coined the
phrase “tool-and-result methodology” for Vygotsky’s grasp of dialectics which, it seemed
to us, described social therapy to a T (Holzman and Newman, 1979).

Vygotsky’s understanding of how young children learn and develop was itself an
application of his tool-and-result methodology. Young children and their caretakers
create what Vygotsky calls zones of proximal development (zpds), developmental
environments that supports children to do what is beyond them, to perform who they are
becoming (even as they are who they are). They play language games, speaking before
they know how. Their creative imitations of the language spoken to and around them is
fully accepted. They learn to speak by playing with language; they perform as speakers
(who they are becoming). The process of creating the zpd is the joint (ensemble) creation
of their becoming language speakers.

Fred and I found this accounting of children developing as speakers of a language to be
equally coherent as an accounting of social therapy. For in social therapy adults are
supported by the therapists to do what is beyond them (create the group), to perform who
they are becoming. Therapeutic work is actually development work: helping people to
continuously create new performances of themselves is a way out of the rigidified roles,
patterns and identities that cause so much emotional pain (and are called pathologies). In

social therapy, people create new ways of speaking and listening to each other; they
create meaning by playing with language.

By this time, we had added Fred’s old friend Wittgenstein to our conversation. Fred had
studied Wittgenstein’s writings in depth but had not, until now, begun to explore the
influence of Wittgenstein’s unique philosophical sensibility and methodology on social
therapy. Nor had he examined the family resemblances between Wittgenstein’s and
Vygotsky’s views of language and language learning. I read Wittgenstein’s work for the
first time, and together Fred and I explored the idea of Wittgenstein as therapist. We
found that others had commented on this, including Gordon Baker, the prominent
Wittgensteinian scholar, who recommended that “scrupulous attention” be paid to
Wittgenstein’s “overall therapeutic conception of his philosophical investigations”
(Baker, 1992, p. 129). In 1993, while in Great Britain on a speaking tour, Fred and I
visited Baker at Oxford to learn more of what he was thinking. We talked together about
how Wittgenstein had developed a method to help free philosophers from the muddles
they get into because the way that language is used and understood locks them into
seeing things in a particular way.

We began to see social therapy as a method to help ordinary people get free from the
constraints of language and from versions of philosophical pathologies that permeate
everyday life. Our emphasis on the group’s activity of creating the group exposed ways
of talking that perpetuate experiencing ourselves as individuated products, not as part of
the continuous social process of creating our lives. Wittgenstein’s conception of language
games as a form of life helped us see that social therapy groups were makers of meaning,
not simply users of language.

So far, so good. But something was still missing. What are people doing together when
they are making meaning? What is going one when people are speaking? Re-enter
Vygotsky.

While I was doing post-doctoral research at Michael Cole’s lab at the Rockefeller
University in the late 70s, I met and became friends with Valerie Walkerdine. Now a
well-known critical psychologist, Valerie was beginning her career then and had come to
the Cole lab as a visiting scholar. We greatly respected each other’s work and stayed in
contact over the years. When Valerie, along with John Broughton and David Ingleby,
became editors of the Routledge series, Critical Psychology, Valerie invited Fred and me
to contribute a book on Vygotsky to the series. So we began a re-examination of his
writings.

One day as I was re-reading Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech (entitled Thought and
Language in earlier English versions), I came upon a few passages I hadn’t really noticed
before. In presenting his understanding of thinking and speaking, Vygotsky challenges
the belief that we speak our developed thoughts. He challenges a transmittal, or
expressionist, view of language. His alternative struck me as very odd, but it also felt
“right.” I was very excited—I had discovered something important and I had no idea
what! I went to Fred and said, “Listen to this!”

The relationship of thought to word is not a thing but a process, a movement from
thought to word and from word to thought ... Thought is not expressed but
completed in the word. We can, therefore, speak of the establishment (i.e., the unity
of being and nonbeing) of thought in the word. Any thought strives to unify, to
establish a relationship between one thing and another. Any thought has movement.
It unfolds. (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 250)

The structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of
thought. It cannot, therefore, be placed on thought like clothes off a rack.
Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought.
Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed
but completed in the word. Therefore, precisely because of the contrasting
directions of movement, the development of the internal and external aspects
of speech form a true identity. (Vygotsky, 1987, p.251)

Vygotsky was seeing thinking and speaking as one dialectical process, one activity.
Children can perform as speakers—and thereby learn to speak—because speaking-
thinking is a completive social activity. This non-expressionist understanding of language
was a particularly satisfying alternative to the two separate worlds view (the private one
of thinking and the social one of speaking) that Fred and I had rejected. Even more,
though, it helped us understand what is going on in therapy. Here is how Fred described
this discovery some years later:

One of the immediate implications that I drew from this extraordinary new
picture was that if speaking is the completing of thinking, if what we have
here is a building process, which has different looks and different dimensions
and different forms at different moments, but is all part of a continuous
process of building, then this undermines the notion that the only allowable
“completer” is the same person who’s doing the thinking. For, if the process
is completive, then it seemed to me that what we’re looking at is
language—and this goes back to Wittgenstein—as an activity of building.
That is, what is happening when speaking or writing, when we are
participating in a dialogue, discussion or conversation, is that we are not
simply saying what’s going on but are creating what’s going on...And we
understand each other by virtue of engaging in that shared creative activity.”
(Newman, 1999b, p. 128)

As Fred and I continued to develop our method, articulate it theoretically and expand its
practice, it became clearer to us that the human ability to create with language—to
complete, and be completed by, others—is, for adults as well as for little children, a
continuous process of creating who we are becoming, a tool-and-result of the activity of
developing.

I love dogs. How they are with each other and with humans intrigues and amuses me
endlessly. Maybe if I lived in the country or the suburbs I wouldn’t see so much of this,

but in a city with a million dogs I probably run into a hundred dogs a day. (I had a dog
during my 20s and 30s—who was of course the best dog in the world—and there are now
two canines in my life, collectively owned, so my dog interaction is higher than the
average New Yorker’s.) One thing my dog fascination does is reinforce my non-belief in
essences. When I look at dogs, it’s impossible to see any one thing that’s common to all
(think chihuahua, Newfoundland and Basset hound, for example). I see, instead, almost
endless ways they are related. I think dogs display beautifully what Wittgenstein called
family resemblances—“a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-
crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (Wittgenstein,
1953, para 66), which overlap and criss-cross in the same way as “the various
resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait,
temperament, etc. etc.” (Wittgenstein, 1953, para 67). Family resemblance was
Wittgenstein’s response to the insistence that he must tell “what the essence of a
language-game, and hence of language, is” (Wittgenstein, 1953, para 65). Dogs are a
delightful reminder to follow his advice and “look and see” what is common, in language
and in life.

My first published academic paper should have mentioned Vygotsky but it didn’t. It was
a research study entitled “Imitation in Language Development: If, When and Why” that
appeared in Cognitive Psychology in 1974 (Bloom, Hood and Lightbown, 1974). I had
begun graduate school at Brown University’s Ph.D. program in linguistics, switched to
Columbia’s linguistics department upon moving back to New York, then switched to
Columbia’s psychology department, and finally wound up where I belonged, working
with Lois Bloom in the developmental psychology program at Columbia’s Teachers
College. Patsy Lightbown and I (still Lois Hood) were Bloom’s research assistants
developing, with her, longitudinal, observational research methods of studying early
language development. Our orientation was in process; while theoretically we were
drawn to both Chomsky and Piaget, our sensibilities were socio-cultural and
ethnographic. But even at this early stage of the Bloom lab research, context and meaning
making were primary.

Among the many issues of debate at the time was how important imitation was in early
language learning, the subject of this particular article. Our data for this study came from
participant observations of six children who were transitioning from single word
utterances to syntax from roughly the time they were 18 months to two years old. We
found that some of them imitated and others didn’t, and all were developing normally, so
it was clear that imitation wasn’t necessary for them to become speakers (I still think
that’s an important finding). What interested us even more was the overall context of
their imitative speech in the flow of the conversations they were having. For the children
who imitated didn’t imitate anything and everything they heard, but only words and
structures they appeared to be in the process of learning (that is, ones they had only
recently begun to use non-imitatively). Had any of us done more than skim the 1962
edition of Vygotsky’s Thought and Language at the time, we would have realized that
what we were seeing was the process of creating the zpd where learning leads
development. For those children who imitated, doing so was one way they performed as
speakers. Twenty years later, after Fred’s and my epiphany about others completing for

you, I returned to this research study with a new understanding of the role of imitation in
language learning (Newman and Holzman, 1997, pp. 110-113).

“An experimental psychologist turned maverick cross-disciplinary explorer of human
cognition.” That’s how I described Michael Cole in a recent semi-autobiographical essay
(Holzman, 2003, p. 39). Not bad, but it doesn’t do him justice. Mike had created a unique
scholar-community institution and marvelous zpd in his Laboratory of Comparative
Human Cognition at Rockefeller University. He was the first to make me aware of the
link between politics and psychology—by his commitment to bringing women, minority
and non-western scholars into his work, his concern with inequality and the ways that
psychological theory perpetuated it, and his Vygotsky-like “search for method” for an
ecologically valid cognitive psychology. I worked closely with Mike from 1976 until
1979 when he moved his lab out west to the University of California at San Diego. It was
a time, especially for me, of serious adult play—with ideas, methods of study, data
collection and tools of analysis. What was it about schooling and about everyday life that
made it the case that street smart kids were school dumb? Could we find even one
instance of an individual cognitive act outside of a classroom setting? Could we pinpoint
racism in a classroom? Could we show how learning disability was socially constructed?
Could we not only provide evidence that experimental, cognitive psychology was
ecologically invalid—would we succeed in creating an ecologically valid alternative?
These were fun and challenging and socially-politically important tasks (ones “raised by
history,” to use a Vygotskian phrase, quoted in Levitan, 1982). Our recommendations?
That the unit of analysis needed to be the “person-environment interface” and not the
“individual” and that the laboratory was not merely a place but a methodology, a
misguided paradigm that systematically distorted what was going on when children were
and were not learning.

“Hi, my name is Lois Holzman. I teach psychology. I’m out here today because I think
it’s so important to support young people doing something positive for their
communities. That’s what the All Stars Talent Show Network, a city wide anti-violence
program, is. I’m talking to people like you and asking you to support the young people of
the All Stars by giving a dollar or 5 dollars or 25 dollars.”

This was the “R and D” for what became known in the activist community of which my
work is a part as “the street performance.” Like all the programs my colleagues and I
created, the All Stars Talent Show Network was built by volunteers like me reaching out
to ordinary people—for financial support, for participants, for audiences, for fellow
builders. For years we had gone door to door in city apartment houses and suburban
homes. Now the idea was to create a 30-45 second “rap” that could stop and engage
passersby on NYC’s busy street corners. Five or six of us to set up a literature table as
home base, fan out a bit into the crowd, make eye contact with someone and deliver our
personal versions of the rap. The idea was to talk a little bit to a lot of people. Those who
were interested we could speak with in more depth at another time. (We invited people to
give us their name and phone number so we could call themand ask them to contribute more. Many, many did.)

Of all the research I’ve done, this is the project I’m most proud of. Today the All Stars
not only continues to reach tens of thousands of New York City kids, but through its
expansion to several cities up and down the east and west coasts, thousands more are
participating. My involvement with this extraordinary youth development/supplemental
education project is many-faceted (some of them more psychological in the traditional
sense), but to have contributed in this way is very special to me.

How was it that I and artists, actors, social workers, teachers, doctors and secretaries
could do this? We could and did by performing as other than who we were. We created
the “stage” upon which we could perform bold and friendly and outgoing and proud of
what we were doing, rather than behaving shy and intimidated and embarrassed. And in
doing so, we became bold and friendly and outgoing and proud.

This kind of grassroots fundraising is essential if you’ve decided to be independent from
government, university and corporate funding (as all the projects I’m involved in are).
But it’s more than just a way to raise money. It’s community organizing. It’s relationship
building. It’s giving people the opportunity to do something small. It’s allowing them to
be touched and to be giving, if they choose. It’s finding out what people think. It’s
discovering that they care. For about twenty years I regularly talked in this way to people
on the street and at their doors, as a community organizer who happens to be a
psychologist. It’s an antidote to cynicism.

From 1979 to 1996 I was on the faculty of Empire State College teaching and mentoring
students in human development, community and human services and educational studies.
The non-traditional part of the State University of New York, Empire was the kind of
school I would have gone to if it had existed at the time—its organizational structure and
design actually supported learning! Students got to create their own programs of study
and degrees with the assistance and expertise of the faculty. A degree could consist of a
number of different kinds of learning activities, including individualized courses with a
faculty member, independent study, group studies, courses at neighboring universities,
practica and internships, and credit for life experience. As long as students could
demonstrate “college level learning” it didn’t matter how they developed it. The whole
set up presumed that the students—mostly working class adults: changing careers; out of
prison or off drugs; finishing their degrees after raising children; managers,
administrators and mental health workers being pressured to get a bachelor’s degree;
NYC police officers recently required to obtain an associate’s degree; artists and
musicians wanting to work with kids—were learners. The few forays I made into
traditional colleges and universities to teach an occasional course taught me just how
radical this was.

Empire was a dream for an academic like me. I saw it as a place that provided primarily
working class undergraduates with the attention, support, respect and responsibility that
elite Ph.D. programs provided to their graduate students. I had been privileged to have
that at Columbia University and I loved being able to give it to these students. Besides,

you could teach pretty much what you wanted in ways that you wanted—and, most
wonderful to me, there were no tests or grades.

My colleagues were primarily progressives (several of them leftists) who had left more
traditional and prestigious institutions to create this experimental college. At first, I fit
right in. I was a leftist, And a political activist—a builder of a new independent political
party. Little did I know that, for some of my colleagues, this was politically incorrect.

Unbeknownst to me, an underground letter denouncing my political affiliations and
containing false accusations about the work Fred and I were doing (including social
therapy) was making the rounds of the faculty. This McCarthyite tactic was spearheaded
by progressives loyal to the Democratic Party who were not happy about the possibility
of an independent party to its left. The letter recommended that I be fired or stop the
political work I was doing.

When I finally find out about this from a friend, I immediately went to tell the dean who,
it turned out, already knew. Naively, I thought he and my closest colleagues would be as
outraged as I was. They weren’t. No big deal, they said. Just forget it. I didn’t. Instead, I
called a faculty meeting at which we could have open dialogue on freedom of speech and
academic freedom. We had the meeting and I remained at the college for many more
years.

Fast forward to August 2003. About a week before the American Psychological
Association (APA) convention I received an email from one of APA’s top executives
telling me that they would be providing security at my presentations. It seemed that the
APA office had received some phone calls and emails demanding that I not be allowed to
present because social therapy was dangerous and harmful, and that Fred Newman was a
cult leader. (Since then, I have been “graduated”—by some who attack our work—from a
cult follower to a cult leader.)

In between that early 80s secret letter and the 2003 APA convention, there were many
other attacks on my work, character and associates. I have always tried to learn from
these offenses: what it is about institutional psychology and popular psychology that
contributes to people believing, even for a moment, ridiculous charges they may hear;
what my own vulnerabilities are; and how to find a way to build something positive from
such ugliness. Most recently, in the face of charges that social therapists violate
boundaries, Fred and I have opened up dialogue among psychologists on the need to
reexamine the very concept of boundaries if new postmodern and relational psychologies
are to be allowed to exist. Such approaches, in which human life is understood as
relational rather than individuated, raise a new set of methodological issues and call out
for a new way of thinking through ethical issues.

Psychotherapy's legitimate concern with the possibility that therapeutic relationships
might become exploitative and violate an individual's rights has turned to a worry about
boundary violations, attempts to define and regulate how therapists and clients interact,
and critiques of such attempts. But all this rests on the assumption of the individual as the

primary human unit. If your practice does not accept that assumption, then what is a
boundary violation? For example, a tenet of social therapeutic practice is that people need
to be organized as a social unit in order to carry out the task of getting therapeutic help
and developing emotionally. It’s important to keep in mind such differences in the logic
and ethics of paradigm-shifting psychotherapeutic practices so that they are examined
and questioned as what they are—self-conscious attempts to transform
psychotherapy—rather than as distortions of standard paradigmatic practices.

Tall and thin, Vesna Ognjenovic looked wispy at first. She spoke, too, in a soft voice. I
walked in a little late and sat in the back of the room where she was presenting her work
on poetry and drawing workshops with children affected by war in what had been
Yugoslavia. Then I noticed her strong hands, watched her expressive face and listened to
what she was saying and I felt what a strong woman she was. Her strength—I was to
learn over many coffees that day—was born of pain and sadness (of war and destruction)
and love and passion (for the work and play of creating life). It was 1996, and we were in
Geneva for the Second International Conference for Socio-Cultural Research: Vygotsky-
Piaget. I went up to Vesna at the end of the session and said, “We have to talk!” She and
her colleagues were focusing on the emotional development of these children, not on
their psychic states. The children’s collective engagement in creative activity (poetry and
drawing), they believed, was growthful for them—and growth was the way to deal with
trauma.

I’d say we fell in love those days in Geneva, so moved were we by each other’s lives and
work. Vesna kept shaking her head in disbelief that here I was, a Marxist from New
York, who had a practice and a community that were giving expression to all that she
believed about building a better world. She said it gave her hope. I was deeply touched by
this—and by her story. I heard how when the war broke out, she had sat in a cafe for days
despairing over the end of socialism, the end of Yugoslavia, the horrible war, the end of
meaning. How she then left the university to do something (she wasn’t sure what) for the
tens of thousands of refugees (especially the children), the trickle (at first) of friends and
students who joined her, the growth of their community (called Zdravo da Ste/Hi
Neighbor), and how much there is to do. Vesna was a Vygotskian who srevolutionary Vygotsky. She was a kindred spirit.

Just about every year since then, I have gone to Serbia or Bosnia-Herzegovina to
participate in Zravo da Ste’s trainings and seminars or Vesna and her colleagues have
come to New York to participate in the broad community of which the Institute is a part.
Our separate work has been growing and expanding over these years. (Through its dozens
of educational and cultural projects involving many thousands of children, teens and
adults, Zdravo da Ste/Hi Neighbor is doing among the most radically humanistic
educational, human development and community building work anywhere.) So has what
we have been creating together—at first out of our similarities and then, once we gave
voice to them, our differences (for starters, we relate very differently to country and land,
to tradition, to ritual, to performance, to emotionality). I think we have learned from our
being together how American and how Slavic we each are, how these differences play
out in how we support people to exercise their creative power to develop and build

community, and how to accept and be more playful with these cultural identities. I feel
greatly enriched.

My colleagues sometimes introduce me as the Institute’s international ambassador
because I travel all over the world meeting people like Vesna. (I don’t really like being
called that, although I’ve never told them so because I love the pride with which they say
it.) Going to conferences, lecturing, leading workshops, visiting programs, talking long
into the night with newly met colleagues—whether in Belgrade, London, Moscow,
Johannesburg, Amsterdam, Stockholm or Caracas—I feel very close to the New York
City “street performance.” This international outreach and travel is a community
organizer’s dream (an organizer who happens to be a psychologist, that is). It’s an
adventure in community building in a very tough community (academia). It’s an
adventure in performing in a pretty rule and role-governed environment. It’s an adventure
in relational responsiveness in which I am (mostly) very responsive. It’s a privilege to be
able to learn first hand about hundreds of innovative projects being developed in villages
and towns and cities and to build relationships with so many extraordinary ordinary
people. And just like talking to people on street corners, it’s an antidote to cynicism.

I now have a name for the organizing I do—performing the world. That’s the title of two
international conferences and a new broader international community that emerged
around them. The first conference, held in 2001, was subtitled “Communication,
Improvisation and Societal Practice.” The co-conveners were myself, Ken Gergen, Mary
Gergen, Fred Newman and Sheila McNamee. The second, “Performing the World 2: The
Second International Conference Exploring the Potential of Performance for Personal,
Organizational and Social-Cultural Change,” took place in 2003. The co-conveners were
myself, Fred Newman, Sheila McNamee and Lois Shawver. For all of us, performance is
important as an alternative to individualistic, behavioral and cognitive views of what it
means to be a person. Each of us has colleagues whose work taps into the human capacity
to perform (on stage and off). We invited them to participate and put out a call to reach
others doing similar work. We weren’t disappointed. Both events introduced us to
hundreds of people whose work—in psychology, psychotherapy, education, health care,
youth development, organizational and community development—displays, investigates
and plays with performance. Coming to know these committed and adventurous women
and men greatly enriches my life. I see them as leaders of the long and difficult task of
creating a new psychology based in social growth and collective creativity, a new
psychology of becoming. They, and their communities, are the postmodern
revolutionaries.

The events of the past century have shown that people cannot produce lasting revolution
with Revolution. If you want an explanation for why, as a developmental psychologist I
decided to become a revolutionary and why, as a revolutionary I’m so deeply concerned
with development, this would be a good one. But let’s treat it like we should all
explanations—as a post hoc story (and not a bad one either). The process of rejecting the
ideology of developmental psychology (indeed, of all psychology) has helped me
understand better the danger of all ideology and watch for signs of it in my own work and
talk. So, who better to quote now than Karl Marx!

It’s people who change the world, Marx said. Many take him to mean “the working
class” or “the proletariat,” a sensible reading to be sure, but an ideological one that
ignores Marx’s substantial humanism and concern with people (all people) developing.
His language in the following quote from The German Ideology is 19th century but his
sentiment is consistent with my 21st century sensibility: “We have further shown that
private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of
individuals, because the existing character of intercourse and productive forces is an all-
round one, and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can
appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives” (Marx and
Engels, 1973, p. 117). Developmental activity, the participatory process in which people
exercise their collective power to create new environments and new ‘all-round’ learning
and development, is postmodern revolutionary activity. That’s as non-ideological as I can
be.

My sister changed her name from Sandra to Natanya sometime in the 60s. My brother
reversed his first and middle names (the child Freddie became the young man David)
about the same time. My parents seemed OK with it. I thought it was a little strange that
they cared that much about what they were called. But I was glad they did it if it bothered
them so much. Natanya died in October 2002, a few months after being diagnosed with
pancreatic cancer. Some sisters are pals; others are competitive. Natanya and I were
neither. We were intimate without being close. We shared similar values yet chose to
create our lives very differently. We liked that we had different skills and strengths and
passions and weaknesses. We profoundly respected each other’s independent path. It felt
“right” to us that we were of the same family. We didn’t reminisce or tell family stories.
We talked. It was just how we were together.

References

Baker, G. P. (1992). Some remarks on “language” and “grammar.” Gruzer
Philosophische Studien, 42, 107-131.

Bloom, L. Lightbown, P. and Hood, L. (1974). Imitation in language development: If,
when and why. Cognitive Psychology, 6, 380-420. Reprinted in L. Bloom et.al.
Language development from two to three. New York: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 399-433.

Holzman, L. (2003). Creating the context: An introduction. In L. Holzman and R.
Mendez (Eds.), Psychological investigations: A clinician’s guide to social
therapy. New York: Brunner-Routledge, pp. 13-48.

Holzman, L. and Newman, F. (1979). The practice of method: An introduction to the
foundations of social therapy. New York: NY Institute for Social Therapy and
Research.

Levitan, K. (1982). One is not born a personality: Profiles of Soviet education
psychologists. Moscow: Progress.

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1973). The German ideology. New York: International.

McNamee, S., Gergen, K. J. and Associates (1999). Relational responsibility: Resources
for sustainable dialogue. Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage.

Newman, F. (1999a). Therapeutics as a way of life. Talk given in New York City.

Newman, F. (1999b). A therapeutic deconstruction of the illusion of self. In L. Holzman
(Ed.), Performing psychology: A postmodern culture of the mind, pp. 111-132.

Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1997). The end of knowing: A new developmental way of
learning. London: Routledge.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 1. New York: Plenum.

Wittgenstein. L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.