The Revolutionary Psychologist’s Guide to Radical Therapy by Jon Hook & Frank Gruba-Mccallister, 2025
The Revolutionary Psychologist’s Guide to Radical Therapy presents a bold, comprehensive framework for anti-capitalist psychotherapy. Edited by Jon Hook and Frank Gruba-McCallister, this volume features leading voices in radical psychology who challenge the ideological foundations of mainstream therapeutic practice.
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#nonfiction
#MentalHealth
#psychotherapy
#AntiCapitalism
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earthling
in reply to earthling • • •The Good, the Bad, and the Radical
Jon Hook
2024 is a strange and contradictory chapter in human history. Optimists point to the unprecedented advancements in technology, longevity, global wealth, and culture. Indeed, by many measures we are witnessing the best conditions humanity has ever known. At the same time, all of this has been achieved at enormous human cost and it is all currently at risk.
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Democracy’s foundations are cracking under a resurgence of fascism, imperialist conflicts once more flirt with nuclear oblivion, and environmental disaster escalates pressing us ineluctably toward global economic depression and perhaps even mass extinction. It is between these two polarities that the suffering masses enter the therapy clinic.
#democracy
earthling
in reply to earthling • • •3/
Therapy seekers are not arriving in increasing numbers merely because they’re suffering, but because they feel their lives—however comfortable or precarious—are not what they could be.
One way mainstream psychology deals with this chasm between our lived experience and actual potential is through an approach best described as “World good, you bad.” In this view, the present system is either hunky dory or non-existent, and it is the individual who is ungrateful, defective, ill,
#therapy
earthling
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or in need of yet another coping mechanism.
Every therapy from the driest, coldest forms of CBT to the warmest gooiest humanistic therapies falls into this bucket. For these psychologists, vast realms of learning such as human history, culture, anthropology, politics, and economy are reduced to mere footnotes on the thoughts and feelings of the abstract individual. This is the reactionary side of psychology, and its narratives predominate the field.
#therapy
#psychology
earthling
in reply to earthling • • •5/
Conversely, from the small and so-called progressive wing comes what we may call the “World bad, you good” approach, which laments the world’s evils and praises those they impact as holy victims. Yet even the beating heart of psychology offers little beyond a condemnation of various diffuse identities, uncontrollable political forces, and unnamable enemies.
#psychology
#therapy
earthling
in reply to earthling • • •6/
You are cajoled into waging the culture war, so long as you ignore the material conditions that produce it. You are invited to cope with more sensitive slogans painted in timely palettes, with the implication that rescue will finally arrive when we all come together and properly grieve.
#psychology
#therapy