Frederick Delano Newman (June 17, 1935 – July 3, 2011) was an American psychotherapist and left-wing political activist.

Newman and Lois Holzman created a therapeutic modality, Social Therapy.Social Therapy Group website ; retrieved October 2006Holzman, L. (2004) Psychological Investigations: An Introduction to Social Therapy, a talk given at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of the UC system-wide Education for Sustainable Living Program. 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."Nissen M, Axel E, Bechmann Jensen T. The Abstract Zone of Proximal Conditioning. Theory & Psychology, Vol. 9, No. 3, 417-426 (1999) 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 (notably Vygotsky and Wittgenstein) and other therapeutic approaches (notably cognitive behavioral therapy). 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 (together with his chief collaborator, Lois Holzman) returns again and again in his later work.

"Undecidable Emotions (What is Social Therapy? And How Is it Revolutionary?)" (Newman, 2003, Journal of Constructivist Psychology) 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'" (Newman & Holzman, 2003, Annual Review of Critical Psychology) examines the two Marxist notions, class struggle (The Communist Manifesto) and revolutionary activity (Theses on Feuerbach).

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.Fred Newman, Preface to Power and Authority: the Inside View of the Class Struggle (1974).

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.Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (1997). The end of knowing: A new developmental way of learning. London: Routledge.Holzman L. Activating Postmodernism. Theory & Psychology, Vol. 16, No. 1, 109-123 (2006)

Playwriting, theater, and social therapy Newman was a cofounder (1983),Brenner, Eva. (1992) Theatre of the Unorganized: The Radical Independence of the Castillo Cultural Center. The Drama Review. 36, 3:28–60. artistic director (1989–2005), and playwright-in-residence of the Castillo Theatre in New York.Cook, Sean. Walking the Talk. Castillo Theatre of 2002. (2003). The Drama Review. 47, 3:78-98. 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.Theatre for the Whole City: the All Stars Project Performs New York City , All Stars Project, Inc.; accessed October 28, 2006 Newman described the Castillo Theatre as a "sister" organization to his social therapy clinics and institutes, where he also used Vygotsky's methodological approach.Newman, Fred. (1992). "Surely Castillo is left but is it right or wrong? Nobody knows." The Drama Review. Vol. 36, No. 3:24-27 Writing in 2000 in New Therapist, Newman and Holzman discussed the Vygotskian thread that linked the sister organizations:Newman, F. and Holzman, L. (2000). "The relevance of Marx to therapeutics in the 21st century", New Therapist, 3, 24-27.

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 (and our) practice of method in order to distinguish it from the instrumental tool for result methodology that characterizes the natural and social sciences (Newman and Holzman, 1993). 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.Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. (2003) Changing the Script for Youth Development: An Evaluation of the All Stars Talent Show Network and the Joseph A. Forgione Development School for Youth, Education Resources Information Center, Institute of Education Sciences (IES), US Department of Education; accessed October 2006

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 (a cable television news channel). 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.""Newman resigns from All Stars Project", The New York Sun, December 7, 2005. Accessed online October 2006 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 (ADL), which Newman described as "politically motivated".Cook, Sean. Walking the Talk. Castillo Theatre of 2002: Newman vs. the Anti-Defamation League. (2003). The Drama Review 47, 3:78-98. In his play No Room for Zion (1989), 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 (represented by the Rabbi Zion of the play's title). 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.""ADL Says 'Crown Heights' Distorts History and Refuels Hatred" , ADL press release, January 27, 2004; accessed October 2006 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."Abby Ranger, "Youth Theatre, "'Crown Heights' Seeks to Soothe Racial Tensions", Brooklyn Daily Eagle. January 26, 2004 All Stars article reproduced online , accessed October 24, 2006

Political organizations

Centers for Change Newman founded the collective Centers for Change (CFC) in the late 1960s after the student strikes at Columbia University.CFC—A Collection of Liberation Centers. CFC Press. (1972) 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."Newman, Fred. Power and Authority: The Inside View of Class Struggle. Centers For Change (1974) CFC briefly merged with Lyndon LaRouche's National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) in 1974, but a few months, the alliance fell apart, an event that Newman attributed to LaRouche's increasingly "paranoid" and "authoritarian" directionFred Newman, assisted by Hazel Daren, , International Workers Party (1974); accessed online on ex-iwp.org, October 17, 2006 and to the NCLC's "capacity to produce psychosis and to opportunistically manipulate it in the name of socialist politics."Fred Newman, An Open Letter to the NCLC (1974); accessed online on laroucheplanet.info, October 19, 2015

International Workers Party