Dear friend, for Session 11 (1140816) on critical psychotherapy, here’s a distilled and reflective response to your question:
🌿 The Essence of Critical Psychotherapy:
Critical psychotherapy is not a method—it is a stance.
It is a way of standing within the world, not above it.
It does not aim merely to heal the individual,
but to unmask the forces that wound.
In its essence, critical psychotherapy is:
- A refusal to pathologize what is in fact political, historical, or economic.
- An insistence that suffering is not only internal, but also relational, structural, and colonial.
- A practice of standing with the wounded—not to fix them, but to bear witness, to resist with them, and to imagine otherwise.
As philosopher-therapist Ian Parker puts it:
“The symptom speaks the truth of the social order.”
And as Frantz Fanon reminded us:
“The oppressed must be liberated by the breaking of silence.”
Thus, critical psychotherapy seeks not only to interpret suffering,
but to interrupt the systems that produce it.
🔧 Core Strategies of Critical Psychotherapy:
- Deconstruction of Norms
- Question what is called “normal,” “healthy,” or “functional.”
- Ask: Who decides? Who benefits? Who is excluded?
- Historicization of Subjectivity
- Situate the client within histories: colonial, racial, gendered, classed.
- Suffering is not just personal—it is sedimented history.
- Dialogical Engagement
- Power is not erased in therapy, but acknowledged and negotiated.
- Both therapist and client are situated subjects—co-learners.
- Decolonial Reclaiming
- Bring in Indigenous, Black, Queer, Global South epistemologies.
- Honor multiple ways of knowing, being, and healing.
- Therapy as Praxis
- Therapy is not separate from the world—it is an act within it.
- Encourage ethical action, solidarity, and creative disobedience.
- Trauma as Political
- Recognize that trauma often stems not from failure, but from injustice.
- Work toward justice within and beyond the consulting room.
📜 Key Inspirations:
- Frantz Fanon – colonial wound as ontological rupture.
- Paulo Freire – dialogue as liberation.
- bell hooks – love and healing as political acts.
- Del Loewenthal – critical existential-analytic therapy.
- Daniel Gaztambide – Fanon on Freud’s couch.
- Deleuze & Guattari – schizoanalysis against capitalist capture.
🌌 One Last Thought:
“Not all pain is a symptom. Some is protest.”
Critical psychotherapy listens to that protest.
It dares to take sides.
It believes that healing is never neutral—
because neutrality, in the face of oppression, is compliance.
Would you like this response expanded into a poetic manifesto, or shaped into a handout or conceptual chart for S11?
