Social Therapeutics

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 (as a clinical practice) is still studied and unsystematically practiced by therapists, counselors and social workers worldwide.

Over the past 45 years since Newman created it, social therapy expanded far beyond the therapy office. As part of a growing movement of cultural-historical, activity-theoretic, social constructionist, narrative, and other practical critiques of scientific psychology, social therapeutics has become a powerful “push-back” to the individuated and medicalized model of American psychology and it’s still global hegemony.

Social therapeutics is likewise unsystematically practiced globally in the arenas of psychology, education, health care, aging, youth development, community organizing, organizational development, and the preforming and creative arts. It continues to evolve through the creative work of inventive practitioners and social change agents as a powerful method for personal and community transformation.

What is a Social Therapeutic view of what it means to be human?

People Are Social Beings.

Social therapeutics relates to humans first and foremost as social beings—rather than as the isolated, classifiable, predictable individuated “subjects” of traditional psychology. Human beings-in-the-world are emergent, fluid, complex, creative and always transforming.

People Are Performers.

Social therapeutics approaches life as a series of stages upon which ensembles (groups, teams, families, etc.) create the millions of scripted and improvised “scenes” of their lives. These scenes are improvised through performing, pretending, and playing. Performing as both who we are and as “the other” is vital to our emotional, social and intellectual lives and development. Social therapeutics taps into our capacity to work and play, learn from and teach, and create well with others.

People Are Improvisers.

Professional improvisers literally create action—they make things happen—on the spot. They create the stage, characters and plot by working off each other. They listen to create — not to evaluate, assess the truth of what’s been said or to negate it. Social therapeutics helps people perform improvisationally and work creatively with everyone and everything available in their lives and in that process generate, expand and “see” new possibilities.

People are Revolutionaries.

Social therapeutics relates to people as creators and transformers of their lives (including their subjectivity–experiences, conceptions, language, emotions, etc.). We agree with Marx and Vygotsky that humans are both determined by existing circumstances, and have the capacity (socially!) to remix, create with, and transform these circumstances into something qualitatively new – emergent, becoming, other. This is the mundane, magical dialectics of human revolutionary activity.

What is the social therapeutic view of human development?

Social therapeutics offers a radically developmental, moral-political-spiritual statement:

• People are creative builders of their relationships, institutions, communities, their subjectivity (all of it!); and they are (simultaneously) the creators of the very environments (stages) through-and-upon which development is possible.
• We are a becoming species. People are not merely who they are, but equally—and simultaneously — they are in-motion/becoming/transforming throughout the life span.
• Development is an “ensemble performance.” It is the creative process of a “developing community” building the “stages” for their development. Thus, development is simultaneously self-changing and world changing.
• Groups – families, classrooms, social clubs, work teams – become “stages” for development (echoing Lev Vygotsky, “proximal zones”) by supporting next-level activity: e.g., learning to talk or ride a bike, to build a school, transform anger, or create a peace process.
• Social therapeutics incorporates playful “role-and-rule-busting” performances of curiosity, imagination, inventiveness, and practical philosophizing. As they build their “stage,” the social therapeutic ensemble refashions the emotional, conceptual and methodological tools they bring to their collaborative activity.

Social Therapeutics Terminology:

Relational / Relationality

• We only exist and can be understood in relation to other human beings and to the stuff of the world.
• We come to “know” and become (also echoing Vygotsky) through others, and specifically by creatively imitating 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. 
• People create (new) meaning together through the activity of speaking.
• “Activity” (as an understanding of what is) 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 the 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, 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 performing as others whom/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. You can choose to perform.
• We always are who we are and who we are growing into. Continuously creating new performances with others is how we organize that relationship throughout life.
• We understand performance as something human beings always do and (dialectically) 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!”