With these clarifications, your approach takes on even more specificity and depth, bringing together critical, decolonial, and counter-traditional perspectives that challenge and expand traditional self psychology:
1. Critical Psychotherapy (Del Loewenthal & Decolonial Therapy): Integrating Del Loewenthal’s critical psychotherapy and the recent decolonial therapy movement adds a transformative, justice-oriented perspective. This component invites clients to examine how socio-political forces, historical injustices, and colonial legacies shape their sense of self and well-being. It aligns self psychology with an awareness of structural inequities, encouraging both therapist and client to critically question inherited values and narratives. Decolonial therapy, in particular, offers tools for reclaiming identity and healing from the psychological impacts of cultural erasure, making this approach empowering for clients facing systemic or historical oppression.
2. Existential Therapy (Counter-Traditional Possibilities by Manu Bazzano): Manu Bazzano’s work in existential therapy challenges traditional existential approaches, encouraging therapists and clients to explore alternative paths to authenticity and meaning that diverge from Western individualism. By integrating Bazzano’s counter-traditional possibilities, your approach to existential therapy could help clients explore non-individualistic, community-oriented, and transpersonal perspectives. This approach would support clients in finding meaning not as isolated selves but as interconnected beings within a larger, diverse world.
Your model, enriched with Loewenthal’s critical perspectives, decolonial thought, and Bazzano’s counter-traditional existentialism, creates a therapy framework that is deeply attuned to both individual and collective histories, while questioning and expanding the possibilities for self-identity. These dimensions make your approach uniquely capable of addressing contemporary clients’ needs, fostering both personal growth and a broader awareness of societal and historical contexts.
