IJSP Number 8, 2026

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 8, 2026 Page | 66 1. INTRODUCTION: WHY “RADICAL” NOW? Across the past decades, psychotherapy has become simultaneously more culturally visible and more clinically challenged. It is more visible because therapeutic language now permeates public discourse, self-help cultures, and institutional wellbeing agendas. Yet it is more challenged because the dominant clinical imagination often organized around the individual psyche as the primary site of suffering and change faces mounting pressure in a world where distress is increasingly shaped by precarity, polarization, violence (symbolic and material), burnout, and entrenched inequities. In this context, the return of the word radical is not a rhetorical flourish. It signals a renewed effort to move toward roots: to examine not only intrapsychic conflicts and developmental histories, but also the lived structures of power, oppression, alienation, and cultural normativity that pattern psychic pain and constrain psychic agency. “Radical psychotherapy” should be understood, from the start, not as a single school with a unified manual, but as a family of orientations that converge on a shared clinical claim: many symptoms are not merely signs of internal dysfunction; they are also intelligible responses to external realities that repeatedly injure the self, regulate belonging, and distribute safety unevenly. This family includes radical traditions in behavior therapy, humanistic and experiential theory, radical and relational psychoanalytic sensibilities, and oppression-attentive frameworks within contemporary psychotherapy. Importantly, these lines do not agree on everything. They do, however, share an ethical and epistemic insistence that psychological healing cannot be fully conceptualized without attention to context, power, and the relational field both inside the consulting room and beyond it. 1.1 CONTEMPORARY MENTAL HEALTH CRISES: PRECARITY, POLARIZATION, VIOLENCE, BURNOUT, AND INEQUALITY The contemporary landscape of mental health is frequently described in crisis terms, but the specificity of this “crisis” matters clinically. Precarity, economic, occupational, housing-related, and existential does more than add stress; it alters temporal experience, narrows future-oriented imagination, and increases survival-based cognition. Polarization intensifies the sense that social spaces are unsafe, unpredictable, and morally charged, while everyday forms of violence overt or ambient strain the nervous system and reshape interpersonal trust. Burnout, particularly within caring professions and institutional settings, often emerges not merely from workload but from chronic moral injury, constrained autonomy, and the felt impossibility of doing “good enough” work within systems organized around performance and scarcity. Inequalities (racialized, gendered, class-based, disability-related) function as continuous psychosocial exposures that reorganize shame, fear, vigilance, and self-concept. A radical lens insists that these are not “background variables” to be politely acknowledged before returning to the individual’s cognitions or attachment style. They are constitutive. This emphasis is sharply articulated in contemporary work on radical healing in psychotherapy addressing racism-related stress and trauma, which frames distress as a wound produced by systemic forces and internalized through repeated relational exposures [1]. Here, the clinical question becomes: how does the psyche metabolize injury when the