Psychological Investigations: A Clinician's Guide to Social Therapy

Description

As an oncology social worker, the social therapeutic approach developed by Dr. Fred Newman, informs my conversations with hundreds of people each month, as I help patients and families with cancer to live life fully, in the face of their fear and pain. A riveting and radical challenge to the basic assumptions of Western philosophy and psychology, Psychological Investigations is a series of supervisory conversations, set in a clear conceptual framework that therapists-in-training and experienced clinicians have with Fred Newman. Newman, a methodologist, psychotherapist and teacher extraordinaire, does not focus on individual problems and pathology. He provides no answers. Rather he invites those who study with him, as well as his readers, to engage in an unscientific, performatory investigation of human life. Dive in, he encourages, to a learning challenge that turns everything upside down - how we think about emotionality and truth, what a group is, how the activity of giving helps cancer patients, what it means to make demands on clients without being coercive, and much more. Get to know Fred Newman - his thinking, his values, his sensibilities, his capacity for intimacy in the service of human development. Psychological Investigations is a dialogic approach to the teaching of this radical social/cultural methodology that I think has the potential to take us out of the fly bottle of emotional pain and social crisis that pervades life in the 21st century. If you let yourself be touched, Psychological Investigations can impact profoundly on your therapeutic practice and your life. It is a must read for clinicians and healthcare professionals, students of philosophy, and anyone in despair about the social and moral crises of our times.