Social Therapy-A Powerful Discovery

People get better by creating environments where we can bring our emotional pain (loneliness, anger, humiliation, depression) and create something new with it - new conversations, new meanings, new emotions, new lives.

Social therapy is not about getting into your head, but getting into your life. It is a psychology of becoming. We help people effectively use all of our creative, emotional and social resources to develop new approaches to living their lives with others – which enables people to transform their lives and the world.

To Learn more, download and read the following articles: Loss of Self (125k PDF) and Psychological Investigations (851k PDF).

A new approach to human development.

We are part of a humanist national and international set of projects with the belief that if we address the issue of human development we might indeed change the world.

This approach is part of a cultural revolution taking place in the field of psychology. In just a few short years, psychology has gone from nearly a century of talk of deficits, disorders and disabilities to speaking the language of positive, possibility and potential. We ask whether understanding human life needs to be a cultural and philosophical activity, rather than a scientific one. Whether people the world over would be better served if we looked at the human landscape with a painter’s, poet’s, and storyteller’s sensibilities instead of with the biologist’s and physicist’s scientific tools.

The Social Therapeutic approach — at the leading edge of the postmodernist movement in psychology — has "family resemblances" to narrative, social constructionist and systems therapies. Developed in the early 1970s by therapist and philosopher Fred Newman, and influenced by the extraordinary discoveries of psychologist Lev Vygotsky and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Newman's discoveries about human development and community building are the topic of numerous academic and popular texts.… the psychology (we social therapists) practice is not the usual – not a psychology of individuals, of labels, of identities, of diagnoses, of attempting to understand people’s behavior. It is a psychology of becoming, of action, of activism, of community. Our Psychology supports people’s development in three related ways:

  • To experience the socialness of our human existence

  • To exercise the power of collective creativity

  • To live our lives in ways that build community….

--Holzman , L. (2004) Psychological Investigations: An Introduction to Social Therapy, A talk given at the University of California, Berkeley

With centers across the country, Social Therapy has inspired hundreds of practitioners and theoreticians interested in an activity-based approach to emotional growth and has had influence in the fields of psychology, medicine, business and education.

Yes, you can change your world!