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Community
Building and Social Therapeutics
Newman’s psychology of becoming has influenced, inspired and formed the
foundation for community-based projects across the globe. These programs, whether
in Bangladesh or the Bronx, are a practical-critical challenge to mainstream
educational theory and traditional models of youth development. Read
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Read
what Newman's Clients Say About Social Therapy
Working with Fred in his social therapy group has helped me grow up in
some basic ways: I learned that there are other people in the world
and that life is not all about me. As part of that shocking discovery,
I’ve come to take myself less seriously. Read
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Links
• eastsideinstitute.org
• socialtherapygroup.com |
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Undecidable
Emotions
(What is Social Therapy? And How is it Revolutionary?)1
Mathematical Meanderings
Social therapy, as I understand it, is done (performed) 2 with
groups of people. Hence, a most basic (theoretic) question,
so far as I can tell, is: what is a group? My answer(s) to
this question (fundamental to my understanding of psychology
and therapy) derive more from my studies of set theory and
foundations of logic and mathematics (which I have studied
modestly) than from anthropology or sociology (which I have
not studied seriously at all).
What is a group? Is a group totally definable in terms of the
elements which make it up or does the group have an independent
existence in itself? Philosophers (including philosophically
inclined logicians and mathematicians) have been asking such
questions for centuries. No less a 20th century giant than
Kurt Gôdel insisted that his monumental proof of undecidability
rested on his Platonistic (philosophically realistic) view
of mathematical logical concepts (including, most fundamentally,
groups or sets)3. The view that groups were nothing
more than "the
sum of their parts" -- nominalism -- dominated early 20th
century positivistic thinking. Ironically, Gôdel's 1930's
proof, while a conceptual philosophical rejection of positivism,
led to mathematical-logical discoveries which in turn formulated
technological discoveries in cybernetics and computer theory
and practice which, to some extent, advanced the general modernist
belief in a kind of soft positivism. Only in the last twenty
or thirty years of the 20th century did postmodernism (typically
unselfconsciously) begin to take seriously the foundational
implications of Gôdel's discovery.
What was Godel's undecidability proof?4 To understand
it, even slightly, we must consider the intellectual environment
in
which it was carried out. Throughout the later years of the
19th century and the early years of the 20th, many "mathematical
logicians" (a term just coming into existence) were concerned
to show that one could construct a strictly formal model of
areas of mathematics, e.g., arithmetic, that represented (modeled)
all and only the truths (the true propositions) of a particular
area of mathematics, e.g., arithmetic. The best known of these
efforts (and, perhaps, the most significant) was Russell and
Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, published in 1910. In this
monumental work the authors attempt to show that all of mathematics
can be reduced to formal logic, i.e., represented in purely
logical terms. But the logic necessary to produce this proof
(representation) included, significantly, the concept of a
set or a group. In the process of exploring the concept of
a set Russell discovered a paradoxicality with which his name
has since been linked, viz., the Russell paradox. What is the
Russell paradox?
The Russell paradox is the formal or set theoretic version
of a long line of paradoxes known as self-referential paradoxes,
e.g., the Cretan who says that all Cretans are liars, i.e.,
lie all the time; or
The only sentence in this box is false.
The curious characteristic of these sentences ("All Cretans
are liars," said by a Cretan; or "The only sentence
in this box is false," where that sentence is indeed the
only sentence in the box) is that if they are true they are
false, and if they are false they are true. Hence, their paradoxicality.
Russell's paradox raises the issue of a set which includes
all and only sets which lack themselves as members; call it
the Set R. On the face of it Set R seems "intuitively" comprehensible.
Presumably, all sets of sets would appear to be in the Set
R since "intuitively" all sets do not include themselves.
No problem here. The paradox occurs from raising the self-referential
question "Is R a member of Set R"? If R is not a
member of the Set R then by definition, it is a member of the
Set R. But if R is a member of the Set R then likewise by definition
it is not a member of the Set R. Paradox! Russell's paradox
startled many a great thinker at the time, who took "set" to
be an intuitively clear concept necessary to construct models
of logic and mathematics5. But Russell himself "resolved" the
paradox by constructing a theory explicitly designed to overcome
self-referential paradoxicality -- a theory with which Russell's
name also remains permanently associated, viz. the theory of
types.
Without going into the complex details of the theory of types,
suffice to say it effectively "outlaws" self-referential
formulations by articulating a type classification for objects
and predicates which forbids applying predicates to anything
save objects of the proper type. Some felt uncomfortable with
Russell's solution. It seems ad hoc, i.e., it seemed to resolve
the paradoxicality of sets or groupings by simply denying that
they are paradoxical. Yet it was not until Gôdel's proof
that the thoroughgoing depth of the paradox relative to efforts
to formalize mathematics was fully appreciated. For Gôdel
discovers a way of representing the paradox as a purely mathematical
truth (Gôdel numbering) and thereby constructs a true
proposition of mathematics which asserts of itself that it
cannot be proven. Furthermore any ad hoc solution (proof) for
this mathematical proposition will fail because Gôdel
shows how an indefinite number of such true mathematical propositions
can be constructed. If such propositions are arbitrarily excluded
then the system in question is seriously incomplete -- there
being true mathematical propositions not included. If, however,
they are included (or, more accurately, the technique for generating
them is allowed) then the system while complete is logically
undecidable, i.e., you cannot prove (decide) that the model
includes all true mathematical propositions.
Group Therapy
But what does any or all of this have to do with groupings
of people attempting to deal with emotional problems or pain?
The nominalistic notion that the group is nothing more than
the sum total of its individual (or particular) members fosters
the positivistic position that we can determine or decide with
some degree of precision what is happening in the group. For
what is happening, on this view, is ultimately (theoretically)
reducible to the relations between members of the group. And
while such reductions might be exceedingly complex they are
knowable in principle -- at least by an expert -- in principle!
In other words -- Gôdelian words -- the group is decidable.
Let me quickly say that our implication that the group (like
formalized mathematics) is undecidable does not in any way
imply that the group is a mystery. No. It is not so much a
mystery as a living organism. It is continuously transforming,
i.e., the totality (the group together with its parts) is becoming
in addition to being (to borrow a formulation from Vygotsky,
amongst others). And as Vygotsky (more than any other) made
plain, the psychological study of becoming is central to any
understanding of human activity (Vygotsky, 1987).
Yet pre-Gôdelian scientific methodology (positivistic
methodology) has dominated so-called scientific studies of
human behavior for the entirety of the 20th century. The study
of becoming has been viewed (if attended to at all) as a quaint
effort to capture the ineffable -- a kind of throwback to a
19th century idealism rooted ultimately in the "incomprehensible" writings
of idealist philosophers, e.g. Hegel Such is the smug formulation
of many 20th century "scientific" psychologists.
The irony here is that it is often these positivistic pseudo-psychologists
who are the mystery makers, ignoring (more typically, totally
ignorant of) Gôdel's mathematical/scientific discovery
and its implications for all of science and thought -- most
particularly, for methodology. Indeed, few psychologists would
argue that human activity (group or individual) could be strictly
mathematically modeled. Yet the modernist presuppositions of
traditional psychology explicit and implicit -- include
a commitment to "old fashioned" decidability (in
principle). Ironically, modern science -- the centerpiece of
modernism -- historically rooted in physical determinism (scientific
decidability) and mathematical certainty (a priori decidability)
has abandoned both of those fundamental methodological principles
(consider Einstein, Heisenberg and Gôdel), while the
so-called human, or social, sciences still retain a rationalistic
set of methodological presuppositions (Horgan, 1996). How could
this be? Why is the relatively simple "behavior" of
quanta and numbers viewed as undecidable while multi-factor
human activity is seen, relatively speaking, as decidable or
determinable? The answer, no doubt, is too hard to be decided
or determined. But surely a component of the answer (or at
least a consideration) is that quanta and numbers don't make
decisions (don't decide things), while people do.
Deciding and Describing
But it goes beyond making decisions. For while stars and molecules
(and numbers and quanta) do not seem to decide things, other
animal species manifest volition and, therefore, could be described
as decision makers. But more uniquely human even than deciding
(though inextricably connected to the mechanisms by which people
decide) is the human capacity to describe (typically using
language). The descriptive (or denotative) mode has come to
dominate western languages (and culture) as modem science and
methodological objectivity have become hegemonic. It is not
so much that we "think objectively" (whatever that
means) as that we think of our thinking as objective. We presume
(without very much thinking about it) that our words and sentences
are, generally speaking, about something. And since the modernist "logic
of thinking" derives conclusions from mainly descriptive
premises, the conclusions (decisions) are mainly of the denotative
mode. That is, we take our decisions to be about the relationship
between us and our world ("I'm going to have a hot fudge
sundae. ").
Many (certainly since Wittgenstein) have challenged this linguistic/conceptual
bias. And yet it still dominates our "popular culture." The
depth of our descriptive/denotative bias is so profound that
for most cultural purposes (linguistic philosophy notwithstanding)
the description is taken to be identical with that which it
purports to describe. Hence, reality becomes its description.
But in so doing, we systematically obscure certain very interesting
features of description, viz., that there are an infinite number
of descriptions and that each event (phenomena, situation or
whatever) is itself infinitely describable. The paradoxes of
self-referentiality are inextricably related to the less dramatic
but more pervasive "paradox of referentiality." For
even if we concede that much of language is about something,
it is difficult if not impossible, given the double infinitude
of descriptions, to decide what it is about. It is reality
(to use that anachronistic term) which is undecidable, not
merely mathematics or physics. The Gôdel proof, after
all, turns ultimately not on features of mathematics or logic
but on features of language, viz., there are an infinite number
of descriptions including those which attribute particular
properties to themselves.
In the premodernist centuries (the "official" religious
period) referred to as feudalism in the European tradition
the decision-making (deciding) ability of humans was largely
regarded as illusory. Human action was more or less identified
(described) as determined in almost all detail by a higher
authority. Many doctrines of free will were related to as heretical.
That changed when, with Galileo, Newton and other founders
of modem science, decidability came to have a different meaning.
With the mathematicalization of physical phenomena (the methodological
essence of the new physics) and the emergence of new mathematics
(most especially the calculus), decidability more and more
became the capacity to properly manipulate numbers and formulas.
And the language of physics and mathematics came to be (mistakenly)
related to as the singular real or valid description. This
new kind of decidability (more accurately, a new form of reasoning)
was far more than simply a new means of thinking about physical
phenomena. So successful was the new science that it relatively
rapidly transformed reasoning (or decidability) for all areas
of human thought. It transformed the philosophical or methodological
presuppositions of all human thought.
The Mathematicalization of ReaIity
Modern science radically changed not only our thinking about
the physical world but radically changed our way of thinking
about thinking. Indeed, the mathematicalization of the physical
transformed the human mind. What do we mean by "the mathematicalization
of the physical?"
David Berlinski puts the matter eloquently (historically) in
his fascinating book A Tour of the Calculus.
It is a fact. At some time or other the mathematicians of Europe
looked out over the universe, noted its appalling clutter,
and determined that on some level there must exist a simple
representation of the world, one that could be coordinated
with a world of numbers. Note the double demand. A representation
of the world, and one coordinated with numbers. When did this
fantastic idea come about? I have no idea. It did not
occur to the ancients, however much they may have been given
to number mysticism; cowled and hooded medieval monks would
have regarded the idea as superstitious mummery (as perhaps
it is); and as late as the middle of the sixteenth century,
amidst a culture that had learned brilliantly to represent
aurochs and angels in terms of paint and durable pigment, the
idea of mathematical representation of the world remained alien
and abstract. But by the end of the seventeenth century, the
representation was essentially complete (even though it required
another one hundred and fifty years for the logical details
painfully to be put in place). The real world had been reinterpreted
in terms of the real numbers. This fantastic achievement is
the expression of a great psychological change, the moment
of its completion comparable to the measured minute in antiquity
during which the hectoring and complaining gods of the ancient
world came to be seen as aspects of a single inscrutable and
commanding deity. (Berlinski, 1995, pp.9-1O)
Modernism as a new mode of thought is, in its origins and method,
the mathematicalization of reality. In a matter of moments
(historically speaking) human thought and human action transformed
from a simple Baconian empiricism and a lingering Aristotelian
teleology to mathematical representation of the physical--
and everything else under the sun. Berlinski is right. It is
strikingly analogous to the historical moment which produced
monotheism. For the one instantaneously cleans up the clutter
of the heavens even as the other cleans up the clutter of the
experienced world. Five hundred years later this extraordinary
simplification (and its presuppositions) still dominates human
thought in all areas. At the same time the methodological paradigm
shift-- methodological modernism (the mathematicaIization of
physical reality) -- has itself come to be examined (self-reflexively)
in the light of the shift.
At the outset (and at a minimum) what had to be considered
was the issue of what mathematics? And what physical reality?
For, as always in such cases, the complete awakening that physical
reality could be (should be) represented by numbers (mathematically)
did not in any way imply clarity on what either mathematics
(numbers) or physical reality (the world as experienced) was.
It is easy to forget that views of what is real themselves
have a long and complex history. This history is so contentious
that the identifiable experts on the matter vary dramatically
from century to century. Philosophers, theologians, geometrists,
mathematicians, natural scientists, physicists, soothsayers
and others have all vied in their claims to hegemony on "matters
of reality." "Matters of mathematics" have been
almost equally debated. From Euclid to Plato to Pythagoras
to Leibnitz to Newton to Cantor to Peano to Gôdel the
nature of mathematical reality and the mathematical nature
of reality have lived side by side conceptually even before
modernism's extraordinary methodological decision confirming "once
and for all" the mathematicalization of physical reality.
Following this extraordinary decision, the study of the nature
of mathematics and the nature of reality accelerated dramatically
as a clearer conception of many things (including, especially,
acceleration) made its way onto the conceptual/historical scene.
Modernism's quite reasonable common sensical "starting
point" was that if reality could be represented mathematically
(using numbers), it was ultimately because both mathematics
and reality were alike in being orderly. The real world was
not a mystically complex hodgepodge ruled by the whimsy of
gods. It was an orderly arrangement functioning like a clock
whose mechanisms were intricate but discernible. And numbers
were not mysterious abstractions but (like time) a device for
measuring -- measuring the complex movement of the worldly
clock. Not only was there a remarkable coherency between these
instrumentalist numbers and the clock-like world measured by
them, but each element in the equation -- the number and the
reality -- were themselves well ordered and coherent. How could
it be otherwise? If A is to measure B, then not only must there
be a relationship between A and B but A and B themselves must
be ultimately coherent.
Such was the "common sensical starting point" of
modernism. What was emerging conceptually (among other things)
was a distinctly modernist notion of measurement. After hundreds
of years of Aristotelian teleological "science" the
horse was now safely ahead of the cart. Mechanistic understanding
rapidly supplanted teleological comprehension which, in the
now wide-open eyes of the "new man" -- the modernist
--was obviously a case of properly putting the horse before
the cart. And yet over the past several hundred years, cart
and horse have transformed so dramatically that it should be
unclear which goes where. For when the horse is a jet propelled
engine and the cart an aerodynamically designed fuselage, it
is ambiguous as to what is before what (literally and figuratively).
Yet in metaphor and methodological model, the modernist horse
still comes before the modernist cart. The understanding of
numbers has grown extraordinarily from the seemingly simple
arrangements of the rational numbers to the calculated combinations
of the irrationals; from the straight forward spatial coordinates
of Euclidean geometry to the spare-time functions of the calculus;
from a firm belief in mathematical orderliness to a proof (Gôdel’s
proof) of systematic disorderliness. And the understanding
of reality has likewise changed from a complex clock-like mechanism
to a continuously evolving universe of quanta, dark holes and
quarks. In both practical and theoretical terms, the horse
is obviously no longer before the cart. Indeed, with an ever-transforming
universe and an infinity (indeed, several infinities!) of numbers,
it is no longer even clear what "before" means. Still,
the metaphor(s) that guided modernism at its mechanistic birth
prevail-- most doggedly (and, in some ways, surprisingly, i.e.,
curiously) in the so-called social sciences.
What is Social Therapy?
Social therapy is, amongst other things, an effort to create
a therapy which is not overdetermined by a metaphor and model
of decidability. To be sure, we are well aware that people
make life decisions (small and large) precisely as people establish
an infinitude of mathematical equations. And yet, since Gôdel,
every mathematical proof or meta-proof -- from the simplest
childlike derivation of “2” from “l + l" to
recent attempts to derive Fermat's last theorem -- is performed
in the context of a recognition of the ultimate undecidability
of the systems in which these proofs are carried out. To be
sure, this awareness is not simply a passive subjective correlate
to the practical mathematical process; it has transformed the
very meaning of mathematical proof itself.
It has qualitatively reshaped mathematical expectations. But,
ironically and marvelously, this recasting of expectations
has not limited proof, instead, it has freed proof of its a
priori modernist constraints and allowed endless movement outside
of the overdetermined box of a priori orderliness6.
The same has been happening (with mind boggling consequences)
these
past hundred years in physics and cosmology. The methodological
shift away from decidability has expanded the universe as well
as the universe of discourse. And yet our "moral” universe
(and its secular religious form, modem psychology) remains
mired in the straightjacket of horse before the cart-like decidability.
Yes, as far as we can tell, we are a decision-making species.
And we decide much more than important matters. We continuously
decide what to do with the endless impingements on consciousness
that make up daily life including, most importantly, what we
call our emotions. But that we make endless decisions should
no longer be understood to mean that the totality of our decision-making
is itself decidable. Such religiosity has been successfully
eliminated in the hard and formal sciences. Yet it has remained
largely unquestioned in the pseudo-science of psychology. The
conservatism of an area of study can typically be "measured" by
what passes for innovative departures. Psychologist Martin
Seligman's recent positive psychology movement illustrates
this point well (Seligman, 1999). For the effort of the new
psychological positivists has moved rapidly ahead (picking
up grants in the wildly expansive economy) without ever seriously
considering whether emotions -- positive or negative -- are
suitable objects of study. Indeed, social therapy rests on
the theoretical assumption (Vygotskian and Wittgensteinian)
that they are not; that what is "study-able" is emotional
activity.
The critical implication to be drawn from this ontological
shift is that "studying" emotional activity is itself
an emotional activity. Thus, the study of emotional activity
is continually generative of relevant "unstudied" activity.
As such, these studies are systematically undecidable. But
far ftom being a problem (to be resolved by some kind of Russellian
type theoretic gimmick a la Watzlawick and the Palo Alto group,
see Watzlawick et al, 1974), undecidability demands a continuous
creation of new kinds of proof which do not rest on the assumption
of a causal-determined emotional universe, i.e., a religious
i.e., psychological universe. Undecidability is no mere meta-theorem
of social therapy. It is the operative practical-critical guide.
How so? By denying that any emotional system (no less all emotional
systems) is a decidable and complete arrangement we are continually
confronted with the need to collectively create new meanings
for proof. It is not that disagreements (passionate emotional
arguments) do not occur in social therapy as in the rest of
life. And it is not that they are not "resolved." Rather,
the method of resolution (the "proof') must itself be
continuously created. Psychology (negative or positive) does
not rule. The therapist (psychology's priest) does not decide.
Majority rule does not determine truth. For the system is undecidable.
Only, on my view, with the recognition of systematic undecidability
are people "free to decide."
Storming the Descriptive Barricades
Freud's (and the neo-Freudians') deterministic religious model
is overthrown by social therapy. There is no authority -- explicit
or implicit -- to which the group can appeal. For the group
is not a collection of ultimately (interpretively) determined
individuals. Rather, it is a living organism that has as its
ongoing function determining creatively the very meaning of
its own activity. The group continuously asserts its undecidability
by accepting in practice its paradoxicality (that there are
an infinite number of group activities (infinitely describable)
which effectively assert their own undecidability. Matters,
then, can be resolved only in the systematic context of creative
unresolvability.
I can see the psychologists, mathematicians and modernist philosophical
naysayers standing in a countable line declaring in overdetermined
unison their vehement objection to what I have said. "You
have mischaracterized mathematics. You have misunderstood psychology.
You have misshapen philosophy." And, by their method(s)
of proof, they are right. But, of course, it is precisely their
methods of proof that are at issue. Does this mean that our
argument must be correct? Hardly. It is the a priori absolutist
correctness of the modernist that is at issue here. Social
therapy makes no claim for the correctness of its argument.
Instead, it urges the developmentability of its activity. And
who will so decide? The group will exercise its semantical
capacity to determine what development means.
For human freedom (in so far as it is available) lies in our
collective ability to create meaning, not in our individualistic
capacity to discern truth. In social therapy we "make
the problems vanish" (following Wittgenstein 1961) by
changing their meaning. We do this not by an appeal to an interpreting
authority, but to the collective capacity (responsibility)
of the group. "Are there no standards then?" There
are the standards that there are. But there is no meta-standard,
no implicit or explicit highest authority, no mathematical
systematicization that establishes completeness and decidability,
no psychological meta-truth that answers our questions, no
philosophical first principle (Cartesian, Hegelian, Marxian
or Positivistic) that we all agree is indubitable. Marx answers
his own meta-theoretical questions well: "Is there no
starting point? Are there no premises?"
This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts
out from the real premises and does not abandon them for a
moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic isolation
and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible
process of development under definite conditions. As soon as
this active life process is described, history ceases to be
a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves
still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects,
as with the idealists. (Marx and Engels, 1913, pp. 41-8)
Marx's radical activity-theoretic method is further developed
by the following:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that
of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness,
is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation,
but not as sensuous human activity, practice, subjectively.
Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side
was developed abstractly by idealism - which, of course, does
not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous
objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does
not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. Hence,
in Das Wesen des Christenthums, he regards the theoretical
attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice
is conceived and fixed only in its dirty judaical manifestation.
Hence he does not grasp the significance of revolutionary practical-critical
activity. (Marx, 1973, p. 121)
The Practical-Critical
"Revolutionary" and "practical-critical" are
here effectively equated. For all activity, qua activity, is
revolutionary unless it is predetermined (as it typically is)
by an interpretive authority (the “official" real
description). In social therapy all activity (revolutionary
activity) is not interpreted. Rather all activity includes
the activity of collectively determining what is meant by the
activity... and so on. The activity of the social therapy group
is its own premises. There are no Kantian categories or neo-Freudian
first principles to which we may appeal. There is simply (or
complexly) continued activity, including the activity of making
the meaning(s) of activity. Indeed, it seems to me that this
is what makes practical-critical activity revolutionary. You
cannot change the world via activity (no less actions) unless
you can change the meaning of the activity. But this is not
to say that making revolution is a mental act. Rather, it is
to say that with activity as our ontology the dualistic distinction
between the mental and the physical can be delightfully cast
aside (into, in Marx's words, "the dustbin of history").
And so is dualistic psychology cast onto history's dustbin.
Not once and for all, but continuously and creatively. Every
social therapy group, every week, makes a revolution. And in
doing so, making revolutionary history (development) is the
cure. For the mistaken modernist notion that all that can be
changed is the particular gives way to the practical-critical
understanding that only the subjective totality can be transformed.
And that by the totality itself. "Revolution" is
not permanent, in Trotsky's dualistic scholastic sense. The
revolution (practically critically understood) is continuous,
in Vygotsky's dialectical sense. Every zpd (zone of proximal
development) is a revolutionary activity (Newman and Holzman,
1993).
How then is social therapy revolutionary? Revolutionary is
not a property of the social therapy group. Revolution making
is its practical-critical "essence." And revolution
does not change the world -- it changes those who change the
world -- ordinary women and men -- "... in their actual,
empirically perceptible process of development under definite
conditions" (Marx and Engels, 1973, pp. 47-48). The 19th
and early 20th century conception of "making revolution" which
failed so tragically as a method for transforming societies
(not to mention human beings) is itself remarkably transformed
into a practical-critical practice of method for advancing
history via reorganizing the makers of history. Our societally
overdetermined "pathology" is cured by "making
revolution."
This "revolutionary idea" has its roots in the 1960's
but it took explicit shape in a talk that I delivered at the
Congress of the Interamerican Society of Psychology at the
Karl Marx Theater in Havana, Cuba in June 1986, which later
became a paper called "The Patient as Revolutionary." That
talk and that paper concluded as follows:
We speak of social therapy as revolution for non-revolutionaries.
This radical Marxist conception -- that the fundamental or
essential human characteristic is being capable of carrying
out revolutionary activity (what Marx calls practical-critical
activity) -- that's the foundation of anything which can be
called or should be called a Marxist psychology. Ours is a
radical insistence that we not accommodate reactionary society
by relating to people -- any people -- as anything but revolutionaries.
(Newman, 1991 p.15)
What’s Happening?
In the ensuing fifteen years, social therapy bas evolved quantitatively
and qualitatively. It is now practiced and studied the world
over. In my earliest writings on social therapy (predating
even the Havana talk), I spoke of how clients coming for therapeutic
help bad the right to expect a therapist to understand something
about how the mind worked and how the world worked. As social
therapists, we take this matter very seriously, i.e. dialectically.
And the dialectical unity which conjoins these two is the subjectivity
of history. We will not accommodate (adjust) people to the
world as officially described or interpreted. We will not offer
an alternative description or interpretation or story. The
point, after an, as Marx pointed out, is not to interpret the
world but to change it. In these fifteen years of extraordinary
growth we have been seriously critiqued by others. These criticisms
have been, hopefully, incorporated into the ongoing development
that is social therapy.
Some have said that our work is ultimately only understandable
if you participate. We agree. For understanding at a distance
entails, as we see it, the domination of the interpretive (the
descriptive) over the subjective (the historical). Others (Marxists,
in particular) have declared that our version of post modern
Marxism is really pragmatism in disguise. This critique (emanating
from Great Britain) is, amongst other things, classical intellectual
anti-Americanism. But we are not pragmatists. The meaning is
not what works. The activity of working is what makes meaning.
The traditional knee jerk effort to turn Marx into an objectivist
is, on our view, a tragic misreading of the Marxian dialectic
(historical subjectivity). In social therapy, we hope to adapt
people not to a sick society but to the subjectivity of history.
And this adaptation is not to something other than ourselves
for we are "the other than ourselves." This radical
denial of objectivity (and all the classificatory/descriptive
gobbledygook that goes with it) places both the burden and
the joy of human development where it belongs -- on us as revolutionary
activists.
Notes
1) Special thanks to Lois Holzman for ongoing discussions of
the ideas in this essay.
2) For extensive discussion of performance and the performance of social therapy,
see Holzman Performing Psychology, A Postmodern Culture of the Mind (1999).
3) This is a major theme in Hao Wang's book, A Logical Journey: From Gôdel
to Philosophy (1996). See especially Chapters 5, 7 and 9.
4) For a lay understanding, of undecidability proof, see Nagel and Newman, "G"del"s
Proof," in James R Newman, The World of Mathematics, Vol. 3 (1956) pp. 1668-1695.
5) Gottlieb Frege was working on similar issues as Russell. For a brief history
of these matters, see pp. 243-246 of The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell,
Volume 1: The Private Years (1884-1914), edited by Nicholas Griffin. (1992).
6) For an especially important instance/example, see W.V.O. Quine's seminal essay "Two
Dogmas of Empiricism. " (1963).
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