Advancing Human & Community Development

The East Side Institute is an international center for the study of social therapeutics and performance activism, which bring human and community development to the forefront of culture change and social transformation. The Institute’s educational, cultural, research and community-building programs and partnerships promote and create alternative and radically humanizing approaches to psychology, education, health care and community building.

Chief among these approaches (social constructionism, cultural historical activity theory, narrative therapies) is social therapeutics, an approach to human development and social change that relates to people of all ages and life circumstances as social performers and creators of their lives. It is practiced globally as both a group-oriented, development-focused psychotherapy (social therapy) and a methodology with broad application in educational, cultural, health and community settings.

(For a detailed history, see: Constructing Social Therapeutics)

A Hub for Social Therapeutics and Performance Activism

In this time of global uncertainty and crisis, the East Side Institute serves as a grassroots hub — advancing and cross-pollinating the practices of social change / performance activists worldwide, who themselves are harnessing the transformatory power of performance and play to engage the horrors and injustices endemic to their communities.

Meet some of our 80+ East Side Institute Associates from across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and New Zealand — many of whom are graduates of The International Class residency study program and/or Social Therapeutics Online.

Our grassroots partnerships / alliances include:

• Creating Our Mental Health (with All Stars Project, Inc.)
• The Global Play Brigade
• Let’s Learn, The World as Classroom (with UNC-Greensboro, Lloyd International Honors College)
• Play, Perform, Learn, Grow (with Aristotle Universities of Thessaloniki)
• Reimagine Dementia, A Creative Coalition for Justice

A Brief History

Founded in 1985 by social therapy’s creator Fred Newman and developmental psychologist and current director Lois Holzman, the East Side Institute functions as a unique community think tank, building bridges between university- based and community-based practices and bringing the traditions and innovations of each to the other. Courses of Study combine innovative theories with real-world practical applications and are open to professionals and paraprofessionals regardless of discipline.

Headquartered in New York City and offering an array of online programming and activities, the Institute is a vibrant learning community with a conversational model of learning and teaching. Through our study and training programs, international conferences and events and scholarly writings, the Institute has introduced thousands of educators, mental health and medical workers, scholars and community organizers to the most successful and cutting-edge approaches to tap, re-ignite and support the kind of human creativity, performance and developmental play so desperately needed if people are to transform the world.

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.

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.