Fred Newman (philosopher)
Frederick Delano Newman was an American psychotherapist and left-wing political activist.
Newman and Lois Holzman created a therapeutic modality, Social Therapy. Newman insisted "that there was nothing wrong with psychotherapists having sex with patients".
Along with Lenora Fulani, Newman controlled several socialist and progressive political, therapy, and dramatic collective groups across the USA. These groups promoted "friendosexuality", which encouraged members to sleep with each other. Newman strongly objected to the classification of these groups as a "cult", and argued that "there is no such thing as a cult".
Because Newman's organizations frequently changed names, followers of Newman have been called Newmanites or the Newman Tendency.
Personal life
Newman was born in 1935 in The Bronx of New York City. Newman grew up in a working-class neighborhood. He served in the US Army, including a stint in Korea. Then, he attended the City College of New York under the GI Bill. In 1962, he earned a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and in foundations of mathematics from Stanford University. Newman taught at several colleges and universities in the 1960s, including the City College of New York, Knox College, Case Western Reserve University, and Antioch College.Newman was twice married and divorced. He had two children, Donald Newman and Elizabeth Newman. He died at his home in Manhattan on July 3, 2011, aged 76, was survived by his two life partners, Gabrielle L. Kurlander and Jacqueline Salit, in what Ms. Salit described as an "unconventional family of choice".
Therapeutic theories and work
Newman and his primary collaborator, Lois Holzman, challenged what they described as the "hoax/myth of psychology," the various components of which were termed "destructive pieces of pseudoscience." In its place, they argued for a theory called "social therapy".Social therapy
Social therapy is characterized as "revolution for non-revolutionaries." In addition to Marx, it uses the insights of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. It seeks to enlist "patients" in the collective work of constructing new environments that challenge the commodification of emotionality, and re-ignite human development.The Practice of Method, is the seminal written work on social therapy, the first published formulation by Newman and his colleagues of a Marxist approach to therapy. Social therapy came, in later years, to be influenced by other thinkers and other therapeutic approaches. The Practice of Method exposes the roots of social therapy. It is the beginning of a continuing investigation of method in the study of human growth and development, to which Newman returns again and again in his later work.
"Undecidable Emotions " seeks to illuminate a revolutionary approach to group therapy by an appeal to – of all things – twentieth century discoveries in science and mathematical logic.
"All Power to the Developing'" examines the two Marxist notions, class struggle and revolutionary activity.
Marxism, influences, and views
Newman considered himself a Marxist, a philosophy that he incorporated into his therapeutic approach in an attempt to address the alienating effects of societal institutions on human development. In his earliest statement of his attempt to develop a Marxist approach to emotional problems, Newman wrote in 1974:Proletarian or revolutionary psychotherapy is a journey which begins with the rejection of our inadequacy and ends in the acceptance of our smallness; it is the overthrow of the rulers of the mind by the workers of the mind.
Later, Newman incorporated other influences, including the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and Aleksey Leontyev and Sergei Rubinshtein's activity theory, and the work of early Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky.
Playwriting, theater, and social therapy
Newman was a cofounder, artistic director, and playwright-in-residence of the Castillo Theatre in New York. The theater, named for the Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo, has served as the primary venue for the production of the 30 plays that Newman wrote since the 1980s, four of which were written for and performed at annual conventions of the American Psychological Association from 1996 onwards. Newman described the Castillo Theatre as a "sister" organization to his social therapy clinics and institutes, where he also used Vygotsky's methodological approach. Writing in 2000 in New Therapist, Newman and Holzman discussed the Vygotskian thread that linked the sister organizations:The entire enterprise - human life and its study - is a search for method. Performance social therapeutics, the name we use to describe our Marxian-based, dialectical practice, originated in our group therapy but is also the basis for a continuously emergent development community.
We coined the term tool-and-result methodology for Vygotsky's practice of method in order to distinguish it from the instrumental tool for result methodology that characterizes the natural and social sciences. Our community building and the projects that comprise it - the East Side Institute for Short Term Psychotherapy, the East Side Center for Social Therapy and affiliated centers in other cities, the Castillo Theatre, the All Stars Talent Show Network, the Development School for Youth, etc. - are practices of this methodology.
The Castillo and its parent charity, the All Stars Project, Inc., supported Newman's therapeutic endeavors, such as a number of supplementary education programs for youth, including the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth.
On December 6, 2005, Newman announced his retirement as the Castillo's artistic director in the wake of controversy over a six-part series the previous month on NY1 News. In a letter to the All Stars Project's Board of Directors, Newman explained that he did not "want any of the controversy associated with my views and opinions to create unnecessary difficulties for the All Stars Project." The cable program contained segments of an interview in which Newman discussed his longstanding opposition to having his therapeutic approach being governed by the American Psychological Association's ethical guidelines, notably those prohibiting sexual relations with patients.
Anti-semitism allegations
Some of Newman's plays have been cited as examples of alleged anti-Semitism by the Anti-Defamation League, which Newman described as "politically motivated". In his play No Room for Zion, Newman recounts the transition in his own Bronx Jewish community from primarily working class to increasingly middle class and upwardly mobile, rapidly losing its identity as an immigrant community tied to traditional ideals. In the play, Newman goes on to present his view of the postwar shifts in Jewish political alignments, both domestically and internationally:From the West Bank to the West Side of Manhattan, international Jewry was being forced to face its written-in-blood deal with the capitalist devil. In exchange for an unstable assimilation, Jews under the leadership of Zionism would "do-unto-others-what-others-had-done-unto-them." The others to be done unto? People of color. The doing? Ghettoization and genocide. The Jew, the dirty Jew, once the ultimate victim of capitalism's soul, fascism, would become a victimizer on behalf of capitalism, a self-righteous dehumanizer and murderer of people of color, a racist bigot whom in the language of Zionism changed the meaning of "Never Again" from "Never Again for anyone" to "Never again for us - and let the devil take everyone else.
The ADL also criticized the Newman's 2004 play, Crown Heights, which was based on the 1991 riots sparked by the accidental death of a black child who was struck and killed by the motorcade of a prominent local rabbi. The ADL claimed that the production "distorts history and refuels hatred." One reviewer considered the production to be one that "seeks to unite the city's diverse youth and heal some of the wounds of past racial violence."
Political organizations
Centers for Change
Newman founded the collective Centers for Change in the late 1960s after the student strikes at Columbia University. CFC was dedicated to 1960s-style, radical community organizing and the practice of Newman's evolving form of psychotherapy, which he would term around 1974 "proletarian therapy" and later "Social Therapy." CFC briefly merged with Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees in 1974, but a few months, the alliance fell apart, an event that Newman attributed to LaRouche's increasingly "paranoid" and "authoritarian" direction and to the NCLC's "capacity to produce psychosis and to opportunistically manipulate it in the name of socialist politics."International Workers Party
In August 1974, the CFC went on to found the International Workers Party, a revolutionary party that was explicitly Marxist-Leninist. In the wake of another factional fight in 1976, the IWP publicly disbanded. In 2005, Newman told The New York Times that the IWP had transformed into a "core collective" that still functions. That claim appears to be consistent with critics who had alleged several years earlier that the organization had never actually disbanded and remained secretly active.Throughout the late 1970s, Newman and his core of organizers founded or assumed control of a number of small grassroots organizations, including a local branch of the People's Party, known as the New York Working People's Party; the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council; and the Labor Community Alliance for Change.