Social Therapy Goes to Norway!

I‘m very excited to let you know that I will be presenting at the upcoming conference Beyond the Therapeutic State: Collaborative Practices for Individual and Social Change in Drammen, Norway this summer. Sponsored by the Taos Institute, the conference will bring together practitioners, scholars and progressives in the field of mental health to produce a lively dialogue and share our creativity and desire to create a better world.

I’ll be co-presenting social therapy along with Paul Carlin, a longtime colleague, graduate of the East Side Institute’s clinical training program, and Norwegian clinical psychologist. Our workshop, entitled “Therapy Interrupted: Performing Social Therapy,” will explore a practice of emotional development that “interrupts” the passivity and victimization of the “therapeutic state,” and emphasizes creativity rather than explanation or interpretation in working with families and children.

Kenneth Gergen, another longtime friend of social therapy, will keynote the conference with a presentation entitled “A Relational Recovery from the Rage to Order,” which will take a hard look at issues raised by the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association (DSM-5), including the over-diagnosing and over-medicating of adults and children. You might want to check out a 1999 article entitled “Diagnosis: The  Human Cost of the Rage to Order,” written by Ken Gergen and social therapy creator Fred Newman. It appears in Lois Holzman’s book, Performing Psychology: A Postmodern Culture of the Mind (Routledge).

Thanks, everybody, for all your support as social therapy travels the world — with all of you behind it. Development and creativity for everyone!!

Christine LaCerva