Yes—we can, and perhaps we must say that.
In fact, these two insights might serve as the moral axiomatics of critical psychotherapy:
1.
The greatest enemy of critical psychotherapy is the therapist’s bias.
Because:
- Bias is not merely personal preference—it is unexamined ideological embedding.
- A critical psychotherapist who cannot critique their own position, socialization, privileges, or epistemic lens will inevitably reinscribe oppression under the guise of care.
Think of it this way:
- The colonial voice, the capitalist logic, the normative gaze, all too easily sneak into the session, through the therapist’s language, assumptions, interpretations.
- A therapist who assumes that stability = health, compliance = maturity, adjustment = success, or resilience = silence—may become, unconsciously, the most elegant agent of control.
So yes, bias—especially epistemic arrogance—is the enemy of critical therapy.
2.
The biggest limit of critical psychotherapy is the therapist’s courage.
Because:
- Critical psychotherapy is dangerous. It demands ethical disobedience.
- It risks institutional backlash, professional isolation, even existential rupture.
A therapist who dares to:
- question DSM labels in the presence of a psychiatry-led team,
- validate a patient’s anger at systemic injustice,
- refuse to collude with a family’s demand for docility,
- or name whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, or ableism within the frame of a clinical conversation—
… must possess the courage of rupture.
In other words, the real limit is never theory—it is the therapist’s threshold of fear:
- fear of being wrong,
- fear of losing authority,
- fear of no longer being seen as the “good helper,”
- fear of stepping outside the fence of institutional protection.
Would you like me to distill the above into a poetic axiom for your S11 opening page? Here’s a draft to consider:
批判的心理治療的最大敵人，是治療者的不自知；
而其最大限度，是治療者的不敢為。
因為所謂「批判」，不是一門理論，而是一種傷身之舉。
它要你拆除自己身上的磚，才能帶病者穿越那堵牆。
If you like, I can develop this into a full one-page opening meditation for S11.
