Charles Rojzman, a psychotherapist listening to the police

Published on 24 February 2011.

"An Active Pessimist" For the first time, Charles Rojzman accepted the presence of a movie camera inside one of his social therapy sessions: an experimental training program designed for trainers in the police academy. The experience, as troubling as it was astonishing, has as its goal helping policemen rebuild relationships with the hostile populations of the inner cities (fr.quartiers). Between role plays, self-awareness, questioning of institutions and meetings with invited guests from the quartiers, the Rojzman method opens the path for "knowing how to live together." Here are the psychotherapist’s (...)

A lesson in Temple University College of Education

Published on 24 February 2011.

Urban Education program and Office of multicultural Affaires Urban Education 5630, Fall 2010 (CRN070241): Special Topics Seminar Facilitating Dialogue and Action with Diverse Groups Instructors: Professors Novella Keith & Charles Rojzman Rationale We live in a time of increasing social diversity, when groups that have been excluded from the social mainstream clamor to be recognized and included. Reactions to these claims are complex: our times are marked by both increased openness to diversity and increased intolerance, hatred and violence, which threaten the social fabric and democratic life. In (...)

From despair to common hopes: community practices for troubled times

Published on 23 February 2011.

The Need Why are we developing this project? This book brings to American and English-speaking audiences a body of work that has achieved international prominence but, with a few notable exceptions (e.g. Rojzman, 1999a, 1999b), has not appeared in English to date. This work, the theory and practice of transformational social therapy (TST), has been developed and practiced extensively over the past twenty years by the first author, Charles Rojzman, and more recently by his students. Drawing from the fields of depth and social psychology, group therapy, democratic theory, and action research, TST has (...)

From mistrust to collaboration: Using Transformational Social Therapy to Support Participation in School-Community Educational Reform in a French Banlieue

Published on 24 October 2010.

Abstract Collaborative relationships are held as all important in school reform, but the research and practice literature provides little guidance on how to create them across social divides marked by mistrust and even violence. Using a qualitative case study methodology, this chapter provides a detailed analysis of a successful practice, Transformational Social Therapy (TST), as it was applied in a school-community planning project in the French equivalent of an inner city. TST combines a variant of action research, consensus-based community organizing, and techniques from group therapy to facilitate (...)