Reimagining Psychotherapy for Social Change: A Critical liberation approach

How can psychotherapeutic practices counter alienation and produce liberatory forms of personhood? Clinical theory and practice are shaped by—and in turn shape—cultural discourses, values, and power relations. Critical psychology analyzes power, revealing how many psychotherapeutic practices function to adjust individuals to unjust social conditions. Contemporary therapies that center positivist epistemology, for instance, decontextualize human experiences and overemphasize power-over dynamics of subjugation and symptom management. In this workshop, critical psychology is applied to identify seven inbuilt assumptions and their risks within dominant psychotherapy. Moving beyond ideological critique, an alternative Critical-Liberation Psychotherapy (CLP) model is described. CLP is a framework that can be used to critique and counter extensions of dehumanization and alienation in clinical practice. Although psychotherapy need not serve a necessary part in social change movements, clinicians interested using therapeutic practice to support genuine liberation may take interest in CLP. CLP centers critical theory and maintains that psychotherapy can provide relational and institutional conditions that cultivate novel forms of subjectivity. Marginalized decolonial and liberation practices provide specific insights into how to recontextualize and apply these conditions to foster critical consciousness and transformative relationships. CLP reshapes therapy as a site where novel ways of relating to self, other, and world are enacted. The interplay between self and society is illustrated through case vignettes, in which psychotherapy encounters are discussed as carrying the potential to rekindle social imagination and actualizing novel possibilities.

Zenobia Morrill, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Clinical Psychology Department at William James College. Her research areas include psychotherapy process, critical and liberation psychology, and qualitative inquiry. Previously, she served as a Research Officer to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health and in 2023, she was the recipient of the Division 24 of the American Psychological Association’s Sigmund Koch award for early career contributions to psychology. Zenobia is also a licensed practicing psychologist and the Senior Research Associate of the Center for Psychological Humanities and Ethics at Boston College. She is an Editorial Board member of the Psychology and the Other Book Series and has served as an executive member on several APA division boards, including the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology (STPP), the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP), and the Society for Humanistic Psychology (SHP).