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About ESI Introducing the Institute Our Lineage —Vygotsky —Wittgenstein Development & Performance Social Therapy Who We Are Fred Newman, Co-Founder Lois Holzman, Co-Founder Faculty A Brief History of the ESI |
Our lineage Over the years we have drawn inspiration from a variety of intellectual traditions, but it is the conceptual frameworks of Karl Marx, Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein that have influenced us the most. The writings of these three seminal thinkers have helped us in understanding the subjective constraints on—and potentials for—ordinary people to effect radical social change. It is as methodologist (more than as political economist) that Karl Marx has taught us so much. Especially in his early writings (for example, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology ), Marx put forth a radically social humanism: human beings are first and foremost social beings. He posited that both human activity and human mind are social, not just in their origins but in their content. For Marx, the transformation of the world and of ourselves as human beings is one and the same task, and it is this capacity for "revolutionary activity" that makes individual and species development possible. The Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky brought Marx's sociological insights to bear on the practical question of how human beings learn and develop. His departure from traditional psychology's understanding of development -- that it is not an individual accomplishment but a social-cultural activity -- helped us to see more clearly how our therapeutic and educational practices worked. His writings on cognitive development in early childhood, we discovered, have great relevance to emotional growth at all ages. We see Vygotsky as a forerunner to a new psychology of becoming, in which people experience the social nature of their existence and the power of collective creative activity in the process of making new tools for growth. more... Ludwig Wittgenstein, widely considered the most original and enigmatic philosopher of the 20th century, challenged the foundations of philosophy, psychology and linguistics. His was a radically new method of doing philosophy—without foundations, theses, premises, generalizations or abstractions. Especially important for the Institute's social-cultural approach to emotional life is how he exposed the "pathology" embedded in language and in accepted conceptions of language, thought and emotions. Wittgenstein said that the belief in deeper meanings and internal mental processes "holds us captive." His method—a kind of therapy for philosophers—helped us see social therapy as a method to help ordinary people break free from "versions of philosophical pathologies that permeate everyday life" so as to be makers of meaning and not simply users of language. more... |
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