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Just Perform It: A Review of Performing Psychology Edited by Lois Holzman By John Soderlund
Fred Newman makes a similar point in Performing Psychology, a recent release showcasing his controversial work, but Newman's point is about a whole lot more. His "social performance therapy" has been raising the hair on the backs of the establishment therapy set for at least 20 of the 30 years he has been developing a band of "social therapists" in and around New York. This has earned him the reputation of what Kenneth Gergen calls a "border dweller" in his foreword to the book. As director of training for the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy and artistic director of the Castillo Theatre, his theatre is his therapy. But he has been in the news lately for a lot more than his therapeutic approach, mostly linked to his alliance with Pat Buchanan, the US politician who has linked up with Newman's reform party. It's hard to place him given the lambasting he has received in the press for his political approach (which has been marinating in a less than popular brand of Marxism for a few decades), but he is without doubt one of the most colourful characters on the therapy set, which alone offers some reasons to pay attention to his work. Much of his appeal is in his feisty propensity for taking on the establishment. For his troubles in punting the theatre-as-therapy approach, one of Newman's earlier writings, Myth [The Myth of Psychology], was likened in an APA journal to "an internal document for a political movement". It could be his vigorous engagement of his work and the issues it tackles that led to the review. That same vigour was brought to the ensuing spat with the APA, a running commentary of which is colourfully, if a little defensively, recounted by in the opening chapter by Newman's close colleague and editor of the book, Lois Holzman. If you make it through this opening round, the scene is set for another full nine rounds of a most entertaining exposition of the thoughts behind "performance psychology", replete with scripts of some of Newman's plays. If you are a little unsure what Newman is about, start with the chapter in which he recounts his search for method, entitled “A Therapeutic Deconstruction of the Illusion of Self.” But don't expect a clean knockout if you're looking for a how-to manual of social psychology. That is probably better provided by Holzman and Newman's contribution contained in this edition (see page 24). Amongst other things, he throws a few solid blows at the concept of self, pokes a left jab or two at the inhabitants of the science fortress and, more importantly, spells out his notion that we are as we do, more or less. Newman's work is a marriage of theatre and psychology, in both of which he has been immersed for many years. "At some point, it got through to me that there was a profound connection between the theatre and the therapy I was doing," he says. "what is happening when speaking or writing, is that we are not simply saying what is going on but are creating what is going on." Drawing heavily on the work of Vygotsky, he notes that if children simply learned who they were on the basis of being who they were, they would never go anywhere, and would stay fixed in the state in which they first appeared. With that analogy in mind, Newman proposes performing exactly who we aren't, getting away from what we think we are to become much more of who we are. "The process of looking for our deepest self is nondevelopmental process and a painfully frustrating one," he remarks, adding that this may be because "there ain't nothing there". What is there for Newman is the potential for an active involvement in the world as player on a stage, which is demonstrated most powerfully in his own engagement of the political and social world in which he moves. The brass tacks of Newman's therapy approach are not patently obvious, though. But the idea that Newman's theatrics could effectively reach thousands of people seems less far-fetched to me that it obviously did to the APA reviewer who tore strips off his earlier work Myth. The rampant success of the Reform Party in establishing itself as an alternative to the two-party political system of the US suggests Newman's brand of therapy as political performance may be a force with which to reckon in the coming decade. My sense is that, if his plays in this volume are anything to go by, performing psychology is not that foreign a concept if you have a basic handle on social constructionist ideas. That should please Newman, who has remarked that his ideal audience member leaves the theatre thinking: "That looks easy; I could do that, I could perform." Review published in New Therapist 5 (January/February 2000) Title: Performing Psychology Editor: Lois Holzman Publisher: Routledge Date: 1999 Length: 230 pages Price: $29.90/¬£18.99 ISBN 0 415 92204 6 Buy this book |
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