Excerpt from Psychological Investigations: A Clinicians Guide to Social Therapy < Books

Books and Videos

Books

Videos

Order Form

For the visually impaired

PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS: A CLINICIAN'S GUIDE TO SOCIAL THERAPY

Editors, Lois Holzman and Rafael Mendez

Read sections of this book in progress, which introduces social therapy through excerpts from supervisory sessions with Fred Newman.

Order this book

From "Creating the Context: An Introduction" by Lois Holzman

Perhaps if I share some of how Fred teaches social therapy, the reader will begin to glimpse his practice. Perhaps illustrations of Fred in dialogue with practicing therapists and therapists-in-training can reveal more about his method than either a gloss of five minute snatches of therapeutic discourse or two full hours of group process "captured" on camera. For years I have attended the training and supervisory sessions that Fred leads for staff and trainees. I have always loved these sessions and in putting this book together I have discovered a reason why. I think that Fred's uniqueness and significance as a therapist can be seen in his teaching and training. (In fact, what he does as a therapist is more like teaching and training than it is like therapy.) Surely this can be experienced by participating in his therapy groups, but after several failed attempts I have come to accept that it cannot be seen in that context. Social therapy is too slow, too uneventful, too ordinary, too unstructured, too pointless. In contrast, teaching and supervisory sessions (appear to) have a point — participants want help with specific issues in their practice as therapists. And such sessions have a recognizable structure — questions are asked and responses are given. For example, a social therapist describes a particularly difficult session and asks what to do next, a trainee asks what it means to build the group, a therapist trained in narrative approaches who is taking an introductory social therapy class wants to learn more about how the social therapeutic belief that human beings are always performing is manifest in doing therapy, etc.

What is special about Fred Newman's way of doing therapy — and why I believe his work should be studied by psychotherapists — is that it dialectically synthesizes a philosophical sensibility with a practitioner's experience and concerns and an artist's penchant for creativity. It is this quality that I think might be glimpse-able in the teaching and training dialogues that are the contents of Psychological Investigations. And that, I have discovered, is the meaning of the title to me.

Fred Newman has had no formal training in psychology, psychotherapy or social work. He was not taught the various skills and tools with which a professional is supposed to relate to mental illness or to help people in emotional distress. He did, however, have several things going for him when he began to practice in the early 1970s: philosophical know-how, particularly in the philosophy of science and of language; a revolutionary's energy, passion and belief in social transformation; a machinist's appreciation for how (and that!) things are made, a working class humanism — and a comfortability with madness. Added to the mix, since the late 1980s when he began to write and direct plays, has been a theater practitioner's approach to the creative process.

Over the thirty years that he has been developing, practicing and teaching his style of therapy, these elements have intertwined and matured into a sophisticated approach to reinitiating emotional growth. Social therapy is an art form. At the same time, it is primarily methodological rather than substantive or explicative. This combination makes it unique among therapeutic approaches (perhaps it's not even therapy). And as art and methodology, it is at once theoretically irrelevant to the psychotherapeutic tradition and exceedingly useful to practicing psychotherapists. It is this very quality that has made social therapy (although sometimes daunting) embracable by therapists of many different schools of therapy.

From "The Dialogues"

The following dialogues originated in dozens of Fred Newman's training, teaching and supervisory sessions; with a few exceptions all took place during 2000 and 2001. These sessions averaged two or more hours of free-flowing, open-ended conversation that often took a question and answer format. We worked from transcriptions of audiotapes, editing only for ease of reading. We chose sections that we found particularly important, interesting or in some way illustrative of social therapeutic method. Initially, we thought we might organize the dialogues topically, but soon realized that doing so would violate not only the process by which they came about but also the interconnectedness of their content. And so, we decided to simply number them.

Questions vary greatly in length and detail; the more substantial ones were submitted in written form to be read at the monthly colloquia for trainees and graduates of the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, staff of social therapy centers, and invited guests. Speakers are identified with the generic Therapist-in-training (a practitioner taking a social therapy course or someone enrolled in the Institute's therapist training program), Therapist (a practicing social therapist) and Student (a non-therapist participating in a workshop, institute or class). Fred is Fred.

Therapist-in-training: I am brand new in the training program and I'm fascinated by the idea of therapy as performing. But I don't understand how that helps people solve their problems.

Fred: People come into therapy and, understandably, they want to know what's wrong with them. They feel bad. They're upset. They're hurting. They're anxious. They're panicked. They're fearful. They're distressed. They're depressed. They can't sleep. They can't eat. They eat too much. They eat too little. They're having terrible fights. They're in emotional pain, or worse than that. They've been diagnosed. They've been labeled. All kinds of things have happened to them. Some of the people have felt improvement from things they've already done. Others don't feel that at all. They come to me, as they've come to others of you who are therapists, and they, quite reasonably and understandably, ask if we can make them better, and it seems to me that the only honest answer that one can give to that question, is "No." We can't make anybody better. It seems to me that what we can do to help people who come to us in all of this pain and distress is to help them to live. We can help them to create something new. We can help them to be who they're not. We can help them to perform.

Therapist-in-training: Aren't they, though, coming to therapy and asking to be who they're not, even if they don't mean, "perform?"

Fred: Many people say, "I can't stand what's going on in my life, I'm desperately unhappy. I want to find something inside of me. I want to discover who I am so as to be able to overcome this terrible pain." And I say something to the effect, "Sadly, what I think we have to recognize as a starting point of this process is that you are the person who's in this terrible pain. That is who you are. The problematic is that who you are has turned out to be inconsistent, for whatever reasons, with your becoming anything other than that." But many people want to hear that that's not really who they are, and that there's something that we can do to transform the inside, some kind of surgical transformation, to discover that this upset, anxious, hurting person is not really who they are.

To me, what is fundamental to helping someone to deal with the terrible pain they are in is to help them to see their capacity to exercise their power to be someone other than who they are. We have the human capacity to be other than who we are, and we simply, for the most part, don't make use of it. Now what is the term that we give to the human capacity to be other than who we are? We perform. We each have the human capacity to get up on a stage and to be King Lear or Lady Macbeth or whoever, to tell a bad joke, to stick out our tongues, to wiggle our nose, to jump in the air. We are capable of performing. We are capable of becoming who we are not. " Wait a minute," you might say, "that's just on a stage. That kind of things is institutionally validated by virtue of being on a stage." "But look here," I say, "this stage wasn't always here. I remember when we built this stage and put it up. We created this stage." We have the capacity to create environments in which we can perform. We can create stages anywhere. We are performers. It's a wonderful talent that we have. The performatory talent is the exercise of our capacity to be other than who we are.

When people come to therapy, I try to help them be other than who they are. I'm not looking to get to the deeper interpretive inside of who a human being is. What I try to do is see if I can get a grouping of people to perform, to create a performance, to play a game. Some people react to this as trivializing human life; I think therapy as traditionally practiced trivializes human life but for me, the exercise of the capacity to perform other than who we is the glorification of human life. We don't have to be who we are, we don't have to accept someone else telling us who we are, and most importantly, we don't have to accept ourselves telling ourselves who we are. We don't have to sit back and say, "I can't do that, or I can't do this because that's not who I am." That's the wonder of life.

But within our culture, being who you are has been transformed into the glorious statement, "I know who I am!" Well, big deal. "I know what makes me tick." The same people also say, "And by the way, I'm miserable. I've spent 33 years in analysis and I know precisely what's going on during every single depressed moment of every day of my life." Well, that works nicely at cocktail parties and all that, but it leaves people fundamentally depressed.

I know this is provocative and offensive to some people, and indeed, it's provocative and offensive to me. Over 33 years ago I first went into therapy myself and it was one of the great discoveries of my life, it was transformative for me. Over the years I have come to see that what was transformative was being with another human being — in this case, a very wonderful person — and being in group therapy eventually with other wonderful people, going through a process of coming to see that I didn't have to be who I was emotionally. Who I was emotionally was nothing to be glorified. So, people come to therapy, and what I try to help them to do is to perform.

Therapist-in-training: Do you mean that literally?"

Fred: Well, it's hard to say, because I don't know what literally means. The therapy I do is some kind of complex dialectic that goes back and forth between people performing as other than who they are and people insisting on being who they are. The interesting paradox is that we never stop being who we are even as we become something totally different.

Therapist-in-training: What happens to your pain and problems when you're becoming something totally different even as you're still who you are?

Fred: What is developmentally transformative is helping people to grow and develop so as to change the gestalt in which those painful problems and difficulties are located. You don't get rid of the pain or problem by way of removing it; it doesn't go away in some surgical sense. . In Wittgenstein's language, the problem "vanishes" by virtue of continuously creating something so that the relationship between this problem, this pain, this difficulty and who you are is continually evolving and transforming. I love Wittgenstein's metaphor "making the problem vanish." I think he is saying that there is a kind of magic in the philosophical play that helps us recognize the limitation of language and of our conceptions. There is not a clear cut cause or moment of outcome. You do the work and suddenly— it seems — the problem disappears. I find that metaphor useful in social therapy. The group engages in the process of creating the environment and "magically" it transforms.

Therapist-in-training: How is social therapy developmental?

Fred: From the point of view of development, I have come to believe that we are better off relating to life as continuous happenings, continuous emerging processes, complex social activity rather than as things happening to things. Periodically we impose commodified forms on continuous emerging processes because it has a certain utility. For example, it's useful to know where things are on the kitchen shelf. The problem is that we leave ourselves vulnerable to coming to see the world in terms of what's on the kitchen shelf as opposed to the processes which got them there and which get them off. I try to help people to take a look at what we do together. We engage in a certain human life process together, and the discovery of who we are is the discovery of what it is that we are continuously becoming. 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 completely intelligible, but as metaphorical. But metaphor is a relative term. After all, one person's metaphor is another culture's reality. 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. Given our culture, what people tend to do, quite understandably, is to commodify activity itself, and to say, "I see, you mean by activity another kind of thing." But no, I don't mean another kind of thing, what I mean by activity is not a thing at all. What I mean by activity is 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, although it is related to by all kinds of people, including the insurance companies, as a thing. You can understand why the insurance companies would relate to life as a thing. It's their business. That's fine. But 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.

To the extent that human beings come to recognize that life is the activity of living — and not the periodic identification of the components of our lives as certain things — they are helped to deal with the difficulties, the labels, the pains, the unhappiness, the distress, the emotional disorders which are inextricably related to the commodification of human life. This is what we have come to understand as we continue to practice and develop social therapy.

Therapist-in-training: Are there certain things that social therapy tries to develop?

Fred: For years, people have asked us, "Doesn't your concept of development, either explicitly or implicitly, include some kinds of particular things that you want to develop? Doesn't the notion of development have to have an end?" That characterization is a distortion of what it is that we're doing. We're trying to help people develop. To practice the art of development. To create with other people in their lives and to build their lives in the ways that they choose. I don't think we have some kind of hidden agenda. Yes, many of us in this room would agree on some things that would be go od to develop. But people will have to creatively determine for themselves what is to be developed. This is a big improvisation; this is not a scripted play — not mine, yours nor anybody else's. After all, you can learn something about acting and performing, but it doesn't mean for a moment that you're going to perform a beautiful play. Some of the most highly skilled actors perform terrible plays. That's what they get paid for, that's where their tastes lie, who knows?

To me, it's analogous to democracy. I am deeply committed to the position that what needs to be created is an increasingly democratic society. Many people who call themselves progressives say to me, "Why are you pushing so hard for democracy? Don't you realize that if we had democracy the majority of the American people would support and enact positions that are antithetical to what is politically correct?" I frankly believe that we have to create a greater democracy and take our chances on that.

Likewise, I think we have to take our chances with development, which means that people might develop some things that you might not think are so nice. But the argument that you should stop development or steer it in a particular direction on the grounds that that might happen is ultimately elitist. That implies a certain power structure where some people give lip service to development and/or democracy but really hold to the position, "Here are the most valid kinds of decisions to be reached and goals to be set."

Therapist-in-training: There may be the alternative of combining development with certain kinds of goals.

Fred: You might be right, but my experience is that when people slip in goals then development gets shaped in such a way as to achieve those goals. Goals tend to be over-determining. We haven't as a species taken this risk and we've gotten into big trouble anyhow. It's not as if the goal-oriented approaches have worked out beautifully! Maybe this is the essence of what I take postmodernism to be; maybe we're at a moment in history where we're going to have to take our chances with development. Maybe it's time to find out if we can get better and better at this stuff — and if we are going to destroy ourselves or not. Maybe the moment of truth is at hand and we should find it out once and for all, rather than just quietly murdering millions and millions of people in the name of good goals.

Therapist-in-training: I understand that you are against elitists, because they stifle development. But doesn't the existence of an elite class provide incentive to other people to join it to learn more? If everybody is equal in his or her development and learning, that's kind of like communism. Nobody's going to want to develop themselves, because there's no point.

Fred: It depends on what privileges go with that. I don't think we want to have a social arrangement in which people who have a capacity to teach or lead are not given a maximal chance of doing that. I just think it's problematic to give certain special privilege to people who make that contribution. I think you can create a community of people in which everyone is motivated to contribute the talent that they have and get the gratification of the total creation — and their particular contribution without it having to be the case that what they get is some kind of caste-oriented privilege. That seems to me what holds human growth back.

Bringing this down to earth, in the groups that I do, we talk about the "stars" in the group. They talk a lot; they lead things; people turn to them. But it doesn't follow from that that people who are not the stars are in any manner, shape or form less privileged than the people who are the stars. Is that so easily affected? No. The culture in which we live is very verticalized. Someone asked me the other day what I mean by leadership. I answered that I'd like to introduce a new metaphor for leadership, which is not someone being in front of someone, but someone being alongside of someone. It is hierarchical verticalization that I am interested in breaking down, not different contributions from different people.

###