The East Side Institute for Group

and Short Term Psychotherapy

As progressives we believe that if people, in direct and practical ways, address the issue of human development — personal, social, cultural, organizational, political, moral and spiritual — we might indeed change the world.

The East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy is an international research and training center dedicated to creating and supporting radically humanistic practices and understandings of being human. To us, this means freeing psychology from its scientific pretenses and transforming it into a cultural activity and study. In our activity at the Institute, we seek out and support others worldwide who are involved in creating new psychologies.

For more than 20 years the Institute has been involved in creating a psychology — social therapy — which involves therapists, students and clients, adults and young people in its creation. It is a psychology that focuses on social growth and collective creativity, not on individualized pathology or particularized problem solving. It is a psychology that relates to all people — in therapy or not — as active and responsible creators and recreators of social-emotional life (or as we like to say, as revolutionary — with a small r — performers). Social therapy is a psychology dealing with continuous and life-long emotional development. 

The Institute’s training and study programs attract psychologists, psychotherapists, educators, physicians, nurses, social workers and corporate executives. Conferences, retreats, dialogues, training institutes, seminars and collaborative projects are designed to create conversation and community.