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. 

Central to these programs, which vary widely in content, is that participants are related to as changers rather than as objects of change; as both the products of their environments and, at the same time, the creators of the environments which in turn shape them. Newman engaged this facet of human life by introducing performance as the method of growth and development.

The programs most closely associated with Newman are those of the All Stars Project, Inc. – an independently funded network of development programs he founded in the early-1980s. Read more

Articles by Fred Newman toward a postmodern psychology

Activity and Performance (and their Discourses) in Social Therapeutic Method 
Discursive Perspectives in Therapeutic Practice 2012 
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Let's Pretend: Solving the Educational Crisis in America 
Special Report 2011
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Where is the Magic in Cognitive Therapy? (A philo/psychological investigation)
Against and For CBT: Towards a Constructive Dialogue  2008
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All Power to the Developing!
Annual Review of Critical Psychology 2003
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Undecidable Emotions
Journal of Constructivist Psychology 2003
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Vygotsky's Tool and Result Methodology
Chapter 3, Lev Vygotsky Revolutionary Scientist (Routledge, 1993)
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Therapeutic Deconstruction of the Illusion of Self
Performing Psychology (Routlege, 1999)
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Featured Video:  Will We Ever Be Normal Again? 
Annual Lecture, March 3, 2004

An Introduction to Fred Newman and Psychology
by Kenneth Gergen 

Foreword  to Performing Psychology (Routledge, 1999)

It is sometimes said that the truly creative work in any discipline takes place at the borders-- by those who understand the conventions governing the interior but who also understand something else. It is at the borders that we also find individuals who are sufficiently free from the tyranny of the normal—the pattern of expectations, obligations and swift sanctions within the core of most disciplines-- that they can risk innovation. Fred Newman is just such a border dweller. Newman is deeply conversant with traditional paradigms of psychological inquiry, but with other things as well.   Read more