IJSP Number 8, 2026

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 8, 2026 Page | 83 The praxis tradition is useful as a corrective here. [18] argues for praxis as a radical alternative to strictly scientific frameworks when those frameworks risk treating persons as objects rather than subjects, and when they detach suffering from its ethical and social realities. This is not anti-science; it is a demand that scientific language remain accountable to human meaning. Similarly, existential radical perspectives caution that mental health discourse can become a technology of normalization, where the “healthy” person is defined as one who functions smoothly within an unhealthy world [15, 19]. At the same time, radical psychotherapy benefits from methodological humility. Brief psychotherapy research traditions remind us that effective change can occur in focused interventions, and that not every clinical encounter can carry the weight of structural transformation [25]. The radical requirement is not that therapy “fix the system” in fifty minutes a week. It is that therapy not erase the system when the system is clinically relevant. Contextualizing means preserving complexity: holding symptom, story, structure, and relationship in the same formulation, without collapsing into blame. Thus, the inside + world model reframes suffering as relational, embodied, and socially patterned without denying the reality of intrapsychic conflict and individual difference. It gives clinicians a disciplined way to ask what the symptom does for the person under particular conditions, what it costs , and what forms of agency and dignity can be rebuilt safely. The next section will make these implications explicit by comparing radical psychotherapy with strictly individualistic models across five axes: etiology, goals, therapist stance, clinical language, and technique. 4. HOW RADICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY DIFFERS: FIVE COMPARATIVE AXES If radical psychotherapy is a “family” rather than a single technique, its distinctiveness must be demonstrated not by slogans but by comparative clinical logic . The most useful way to do this is to contrast radical psychotherapy with more strictly individualistic models across five axes that shape everyday practice: how suffering is explained, what counts as change, how the therapist positions the self, what language is used to describe the client, and how techniques are framed and deployed. Across these axes, the same presenting problem, such as social anxiety, can be conceptualized in radically different ways, leading to different interventions and different ethical consequences. 4.1 EXPLAINING SUFFERING: INTRAPSYCHIC ACCOUNTS VS INTRAPSYCHIC + SOCIAL/STRUCTURAL ACCOUNTS In many mainstream approaches, suffering is explained primarily through intrapsychic mechanisms: cognitive distortions, affect dysregulation, maladaptive schemas, internal conflicts, or conditioned behavioral patterns. These explanations are clinically valuable, yet radical psychotherapy argues they become incomplete when they treat the person as if they were the sole site of causality. A radical formulation adds the social-structural layer: how power, socialization, inequality, discrimination, institutional harm, and cultural normativity shape the client’s internal world and constrain choices. As critical psychotherapy argues, therapeutic explanation must be alert to how distress is produced and maintained by broader social conditions rather than only by individual “dysfunction” [17]. Praxis-oriented thinking extends this by cautioning that purely