Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy [Paperback]

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.

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.

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.