ABOUT

Social Therapeutics

Why Social Therapeutics?

No matter where they live or what they do, people want health, happiness and hope. They want possibilities, not prescriptions. They want development, not diagnoses. They want to be connected, not constrained. They want opportunities, not fixed identities and labels.

Social therapeutics has been helping people live their lives in new ways that generate hope, possibility, connection and opportunity. It is a social and cultural approach to human learning and development, not a biologically scientific approach. As a philosophically informed, practically oriented “practice of method,” social therapeutics relates to human beings not as behaving individuals who only adapt to culture, but as culture creators and ensemble performers of their lives.

Where did Social Therapeutics originate and where is it practiced??

Social therapeutics originated in social therapy, a non-diagnostic group-oriented psychotherapy developed by Fred Newman in the 1970s and still studied and practiced by therapists, social workers, counselors and coaches worldwide. During the forty-five years since Newman created it, social therapy’s approach expanded far beyond the therapy office. As social therapeutics, it is now a recognized alternative to the individuated and medicalized approach to human life of mainstream American psychology and its global hegemony. Social therapeutics is practiced in the US and internationally in psychology and other human sciences, education, health care, aging, youth work, community organizing, and theatre and creative arts approaches to social change.

How is Social Therapeutics different?

The social therapeutic view of what it is to be a person is a radical and a profoundly humanizing moral-political-spiritual statement.

  • Social therapeutics is a psychology of becoming. It understands and relates to people not merely as who they are, but equally—and simultaneously—as who and how people are continuously becoming.
  • Social therapeutics is a practical method of continuous development throughout the life span—with development being what people create, rather than something that happens to us when we are children.
  • Social therapeutics incorporates play, performance and practical philosophy to inspire human development and community development through generating group creativity.
  • Social therapeutics is a rejection in practice of mainstream psychology’s presuppositions about persons, individuals, groups, therapy, cure, treatment, development and learning.
  • In social therapeutics, the development and learning of people, no matter the age or circumstance, is tied to the collective, creative process of developing community. Rather than being defined from the outside and by others, this kind of community is defined by those who create it.
  • At the theoretical and conceptual level, social therapeutics engages similar issues of concern as others who have developed alternatives to mainstream psychology, especially social constructionists, narrativists, cultural historical activity theorists and critical psychologists and educators.

How is Social Therapeutics radically humanizing?

People Are Social Beings.

The self-contained, isolated individual is the official subject matter of psychology. Not so for social therapeutics. Humans are social beings—we are always in relation and part of something larger than ourselves. We and the world we live in are continuously emergent, complex and rarely predictable—because we and it are always transforming. Human beings are not fully formed, but are characterized by fluidity, complexity and creativity.

People Are Performers.


The language of the theatre does a far better job of capturing the fact that people are socially connected and always creating things together than psychological terms do. For example, social therapeutics views life as a series of stages upon which ensembles (groups, teams) create the millions of scenes (scripted and improvised) of their lives. These scenes are created through performing, pretending, playing and improvising. Performing—being who we are and “other” than who we are—is vital to our emotional, social and intellectual lives. Social therapeutics emphasizes the ensemble activity of creating the performance and in this it differs from psychoanalytic, psychodrama and group dynamic approaches. It taps into our capacity to work and play, learn from and teach, and create well with others.

People Are Improvisers.


Improvising means being spontaneous, dealing with the unexpected, breaking with a script and not following the rules. Everyone is an improviser some of the time. Professional improvisers literally create action—they make things happen—on the spot. They create their stage, characters and plot by working off each other. They listen with an openness that is rare in other discourse situations. They listen in order to create, not to evaluate, assess or negate. Too often, people listen selectively to what others are saying—to hear something they agree or disagree with, to assess the “truth value” of what is said, to size up the speaker, or to hear the pause that signals “it’s my turn now.” Social therapeutics helps people perform improvisationally and work creatively with everyone and everything available in all the scenes of our lives.

People are Revolutionaries.


We agree with Marx and Vygotsky that human beings are both determined by the existing circumstances (“what is”) and have the capacity to transform these circumstances into something new (“what is becoming”). They called this revolutionary activity. Social therapeutics is informed by this dialectical theory of change and relates to people as creators and transformers of their lives.

Social Therapeutics Terminology:

Relational / Relationality

  • Everything in the world exists only in relation to other things.
  • This is as much the case for human beings as it is for the things of nature. We only exist and can be understood in relation to other human beings and to the things in the world.
  • We come to “know” ourselves and become who we are through others.
  • It is by virtue of our relationality—our connectedness and the collaborative nature of human activity—that people grow, learn and things get done.

Activity

  • Activity is, in social therapeutics, revolutionary activity.
  • It is revolutionary because activity is the changing of the historical totality(ies) by human beings. It is the transformation of what exists and what determines us by us, which, simultaneously transforms us.
  • Activities are inclusive of everything. Activity gives expression to relationality, to the connectedness of everything. “Doings” do not.
  • People create meaning together through the activity of speaking.
  • The value of activity as an ontological unit for understanding human beings is that gets beyond the dichotomy of thought and action that is present in other ontological units and, therefore, beyond the mind/body split.

Development

  • Human beings create development. It is not something that happens to us.
  • The process of developing as a person, a family, a group, a community, a nation, a world is socially accomplished, not an individual unfolding of an internal and linear process.
  • Development is a qualitative process of transforming ourselves.
  • Development does not need to stop at childhood. When it does, because of cultural and social constraints, it can be reinitiated in environments that support the activity of developing.
  • Qualitative social change requires the emergent and continuous activity of everyone developing.

Play

  • Play is essential for learning and growing at any age.
  • There are many kinds of play but the most important for development is play that involves us in doing things we do not yet know how to do and being people and animals that we are not. In play, we can be dancers when we don’t know how to dance; we can read books when we don’t know how to read, we can meow like a kitten even though we are not one.
  • Playing at something other than you is how you become that something other.
  • While we usually think of play as what someone is doing, play is equally how someone is doing what they are doing.

Performance

  • Performance is a new ontology, an alternative way of understanding what human beings do. It is different from behavior, doing and acting.
  • Life is performance.
  • You can choose to perform.
  • We always are who we are/who we are becoming. Continuously creating new performances is how we organize that relationship all through our lives.
  • Since we are not limited by an overzealous appeal to the Law of the Excluded Middle, we are perfectly comfortable understanding performance as something human beings always do and as something human beings can choose to do.
  • Performances can be evaluated but performance language should not be judgmental.

Improvisation

  • It is useful to make a distinction between improvisation and improv, both of which are important in social therapeutics.
  • Life is an improvisational rather than a scripted performance.
  • Improv training (i.e., learning the skills of improv comedy) helps people build an ensemble and have a sense of ensemble (building).
  • The value of improv training in our work is that it involves people in creating discourse in a new and different way, specifically, discourse that does not highlight truth; is other directed/has an audience; goes someplace unexpected.
  • The improvisational nature of social therapeutics lies in supporting people to create with what’s been said rather than respond to and with “aboutness.”
  • The social therapeutic improv rule: “Don’t negate! Do create!”