This month Palgrave Macmillan is out with a new book, Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Implications for Practice. It’s edited by Del Loewenthal, Professor of Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Roehampton in the UK, and features a chapter by Lois Holzman, Relating to People as Revolutionaries.
Social therapy originated in the 1970s as part of the social-cultural change movements of the time, which tied the “personal” to the political. It was developed by a community of activists who began by working in the poorest communities of New York City and has since gone on to organize middle class and wealthy people to support poor people to develop and provide leadership to the process of positive social change, free of government, corporate or university dependence. In this organizing process, new kinds of relationships are created between rich and poor, and all develop emotionally, socially and culturally.
More about the book in Holzman’s post, “What’s the Point of Being Critical?” which you can find HERE.
Also if you’re interested in turning a page back in the history of social therapy, take a look at Fred Newman’s chapter from the “Myth of Psychology” (c. 1991), entitled “The Patient as Revolutionary.“ The chapter is based upon a lecture Newman delivered at the Congress of the Inter-American Society of Psychology at the Karl Marx Theatre in Havana, Cuba, June 1986, and originally titled The Psychopathology of the U.S. Left.