My Experience and Discovery of Social Therapy

I'm writing to introduce you to a new concept and practice of human development, to a growing international performance movement, and to tell you the story of how I wound up in New York City with a group of playful activists.

My name is Esben Wilstrup and I normally label myself as a Danish roleplayer, a postgraduate psychology student, and a playful activist. During the last 5 years or so, I've devoted my life to exploring the potential of play and performance for human learning and development - a quest which have led me from my base in Aarhus in Denmark, to Moscow in Russia, to Sydney in Australia, and finally to New York in the United States, where I just completed a one year training program called The International Class at the East Side Institute.

I first heard about the East Side Institute when I organized a summer camp to engage my fellow psychology students in practical workshops. The most charismatic and crazy of the workshop leaders, a psychologist named Volker Bunzendahl, playfully engaged us in his workshop in postmodern school development. Volker showed us how he successfully organized a 3-day chaotic carnival at a school through which teachers and students were challenged to play with their usual social roles and relationships and given the opportunity to change these performances of their everyday life. I was amazed to find someone practicing what I hoped to become. Volker shared with me that the foundation for his approach came from social therapy, an approach that was developed by philosopher and therapist Dr. Fred Newman and developmental psychologist Dr. Lois Holzman at the East Side Institute in New York City.

The East Side Institute is a non-profit international research and training center which through the last 40 years has developed a unique group-oriented performative approach to human development called social therapy that relates to people of all ages as social performers and creators of their lives — of what they, their communities and the world are becoming. Social therapy encourages us to become the directors in our own lives, and to begin improvising new ‘roles’, and ‘scenes’ with each other so that we may collectively become more playful in the areas of our lives which are a bit too ‘scripted’ and don’t allow for our creative unfolding of the everyday performance of our lives. This methodology is a postmodern practical advancement of the discoveries/understanding of the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Marx and psychologist Lev Vygotsky that our lives, learning, development, and language are first and foremost collective creative activities. As such it shares some family resemblances with narrative and systemic therapy and improvisational theatre.

During my the last year, I’ve been studying and practicing social therapy in The International Class with activists from India, Uganda, Brazil, Canada, South Africa, USA, and the Philippines who, in very different ways, work towards creating a better world for their peers. It’s been a crazy and developmental ride as we’ve engaged philosophical, political and psychological questions together through conversation, performance, and silence both online and face to face at our visits in New York. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to engage such difficult questions with people who are committed to making a difference in the world and I’m proud to call them my friends and colleagues today. To get a glimpse of some of the people and the focus of The International Class check out this 5 minutes long video.

I’ve learned to practice social therapy through engaging in improvisational theatre, philosophical film nights, political play-readings, academic conferences, political discussions, street interviews, observation of group therapy and by being in group therapy myself. I've been in weekly group therapy at the Social Therapy Group during the last 5 five months, and I've found it really helpful and growthful. It is really like no other therapy I've seen before, and I've studied psychology for five years now. It's much more social and creative than the alternatives I know of, and it's focused on emotional development, not on just adjusting you to a situation.

I’ve learned something about how we can create community with other people, how we can create developmental learning environments, and how we can make a difference in the world. And then I’ve learned a lot about how other people perceive me, what I can give others, and how I can further develop. I’ve had to deal with how I impacted and sometimes intimidated my classmates; how I realized my disconnect and ignorance of my particular position as a privileged white male from a rich country; how I had to stop trying to be such a 'nice' guy because it was getting in the way of me becoming more than that for other people; how I was pushed to give up my 'this', my specialness, my weirdness, my loneliness as something private, and instead give it to people; how I was/is holding on to my privileged position as a knower and using it to position myself in relation to others; and how I again and again had to let go of individual knowing and engage in the collective performance of life. It is without question the greatest experience I’ve had in my life and I’ve developed my approach to the world, to politics, to psychology, to pedagogy, to people very different from me, and to myself. I have become a firm supporter of this performative practice and would really love to share this experience and discovery with you.

In the US, this performative approach is now practiced in as varied settings as supplemental education programs, teacher training, psychotherapy, corporate consulting, electoral politics, and experimental theatre. These different projects are all part of a larger international grassroots movement involving thousands of people worldwide from all walks of life works towards developing alternatives to mainstream and traditional models of helping, healing, teaching and building community (which I experienced when I participated in the Institute’s latest international conference called Performing the World 2008 where 500 people from 27 countries with very diverse backgrounds and ideologies came together to present and develop their practice of development through performance).

I would love to tell you more about my experience, about The International Class, and about the projects I’m creating in Denmark now, and I know that you’re always welcome to write an email to Institute Director, Lois Holzman at lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org to learn more. If you want to read a bit more about the approach, I suggest you check out the institute's website and especially the article ”Creating Stages for Development: A Learning Community with Many Tasks and No Goal” which in less than 20 pages introduces the practice, history, and theoretical foundations for social therapy, and describes such a kind of community that I would like to build with you.

Please write me back and let me know what your response is to this post and to the practice of human development it describes. I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Yours sincerely,

Esben