Frederick Delano Newman (June 17, 1935 – July 3, 2011) was an American philosopher, psychotherapist, playwright, and political activist and the creator of a therapeutic modality, Social Therapy. Early life Born in 1935 in New York City's The Bronx, 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. He earned a Ph.D. in analytic philosophy and in foundations of mathematics from Stanford University in 1962. After his graduate work at Stanford, 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. Work The Practice of Method – An Introduction to the Foundations of Social Therapy (Fred Newman, Lois Hood (née Holzman), & Staff of the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research, 1979, The New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research) During the 1960s and 1970s, there were diverse challenges to authoritarian and repressive social and political institutions. The institutions of psychiatry and psychotherapy, in particular, were the targets of passionate critiques by Sylvere Lotringer, R.D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, among others. There were significant challenges to the class, racial, patriarchal, and homophobic biases in psychoanalysis and in Freudian and neo-Freudian therapies. There were also attempts to synthesize Marx and Freud. 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. In The Practice of Method, the title itself is the first provocation in a book that is full of them. A method is conventionally understood as something which is applied to (practiced on) appropriate objects. The practice of method is propounded as a new conception of method – not a method to be practiced, but a method that is a practice. Another provocation is directed at anti-Marxists. Newman and his colleagues do