Certainly! Here’s a more complete and elegant overview of Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling: Implications for Practice (edited by Del Loewenthal, 2015), along with reflections on additional possibilities for critical psychotherapy:
1. Main Points of
Critical Psychotherapy, Psychoanalysis and Counselling
(Del Loewenthal, 2015)
Scope & Purpose
The volume explores what being “critical” means for talking therapies amid increasing state intervention and neoliberal influence. It brings together diverse perspectives—including queer theory, feminism, Marxism, critical psychiatry, and survivor movements—to challenge dominant clinical paradigms .
Key Themes Across Chapters:
- Neoliberalism and the Medical Model
The opening chapter critically examines how psychiatric and therapeutic practices are shaped by neoliberal agendas and medicalization . - Critical Psychology & Political Economy
Insights from Ian Parker and others situate psychotherapy within social power structures, helping to destabilize individualizing and depoliticizing frameworks . - User & Survivor Perspectives
First-person narratives underscore how diagnostic labels can override personal meaning and how therapy can instead affirm lived experience . - External Critiques
Contributors draw on critical theory, queer and feminist perspectives to challenge normative assumptions, relational models, and capitalist production modes in therapy . - Internal Critique from Practitioners
Practitioners such as Andrew Samuels and Colin Feltham explore how therapy itself can decolonize assumptions, question professional orthodoxy, and open to emergent forms of resistance . - Philosophical Innovation
Chapters invoke Deleuzian ideas, the notion of therapy as a site of event and resistance, and the importance of embodied sense-making .
Significance
This collection is not prescriptive but deeply reflective. It urges practitioners to engage actively with the socio-political contexts of therapy and become ethically located, critically humble, and historically conscious healing agents .
2. Other Possibilities of Critical Psychotherapy
Beyond what Loewenthal’s volume covers, critical psychotherapy can evolve through other creative and antagonistic strategies:
a.
Posthuman & Ecological Critique
Including non-human, ecosomatic, and technological perspectives (e.g., Donna Haraway, Karen Barad)—to de-center the human and address planetary trauma.
b.
Spiritual and Indigenous Epistemologies
Engaging with ancestral, non-Western healing traditions (e.g., African cosmologies, Indigenous ontologies), to challenge colonial healing paradigms.
c.
Digital Solidarity Spaces
Using online platforms for peer-led, horizontal therapy, circumventing institutional gatekeeping—yet critically attending to data politics and digital labor.
d.
Radical Collective Praxis
Shifting from therapy as individual transformation to collective healing—using community rituals, storytelling, or protest as therapeutic forms.
e.
Critical Autoethnography
Therapists using their own writing, autoethnography, and poetic reflection as part of the therapeutic apparatus—making therapy visible and accountable.
f.
Material-Discursive Activation
Drawing from new materialist thought: recognizing the vibrancy of objects, spaces, and bodies—e.g., healing not only via talk but via movement, architecture, or art—making therapy as assemblage, not service.
Summary Table
|
Feature |
Loewenthal’s Critical Psychotherapy |
Additional Possibilities |
|
Focus |
Therapy within neoliberal, psychiatric state paradigm |
Decentering human, engaging spiritual & ecological worlds |
|
Critical Frameworks |
Marxism, feminism, queer theory, survivor voice |
Indigenous epistemologies, posthuman materialism |
|
Therapeutic Stance |
Deconstruction, ethical witnessing, practitioner reflexivity |
Collective ritual, autoethnography, digital solidarity |
|
Goal of Therapy |
Aware relational practice, contextually grounded healing |
Planetary, communal, non-anthropocentric healing |
Would you like this structured into a conceptual diagram or handout for your S11 session? Or perhaps paired with existential-philosophical reflections and quotes?
