IJSP Number 8, 2026

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 8, 2026 Page | 86 power? We design exposures that build agency, not compliance. We practice boundary-setting scripts, self-advocacy, and selective disclosure in addition to tolerance of discomfort.” In other words, the radical clinician does not treat courage as submission to harmful contexts; courage becomes the capacity to choose, protect oneself, and still risk connection where it is possible. These five axes clarify that radical psychotherapy is not a rejection of psychological science or clinical technique; it is a reorientation of psychotherapy’s explanatory and ethical center of gravity. By integrating intrapsychic depth with social- structural realism, radical psychotherapy aims to prevent two clinical failures: (1) blaming the individual for systemic injury, and (2) reducing therapy to adaptation training in environments that continue to wound. In the next section, we move from comparison to consolidation: the core principles that guide radical clinical practice across modalities and theoretical differences. 5. CLINICAL PRINCIPLES OF RADICAL PSYCHOTHERAPY: A SET OF POSTULATES Radical psychotherapy becomes clinically coherent when it is anchored in a small set of postulates that guide formulation, language, and intervention across modalities. These principles are not “political add-ons”; they function as clinical decision rules, helping the therapist determine what to emphasize, what to avoid, and how to protect the client’s dignity while still promoting change. In a field increasingly shaped by professionalization, standardization, and performance metrics, these postulates also serve as safeguards against a subtle drift: therapy becoming a technology of adaptation rather than a practice of ethically grounded healing [22]. What follows is a concise, argument-based set of principles that can be operationalized in everyday work. 5.1 CONTEXTUALIZING WITHOUT DENYING PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY Radical psychotherapy contextualizes distress to prevent moral misattribution, mistaking socially produced injury for personal defect, yet it does not dissolve agency into sociological determinism. Contextualization means that the therapist treats symptoms as intelligible responses to lived conditions (precarity, discrimination, relational threat), while still asking what choices remain possible within constraint and how new choices can be expanded over time [15]. In practice, responsibility is reframed from “you caused this” to “you can influence what happens next,” a shift that reduces shame while preserving the client’s capacity for action and change. 5.2 POWER IN THE CONSULTING ROOM: TRANSPARENCY, NEGOTIATION, CONTRACT, AND LIMITS A radical stance treats the therapy room as a micro-social field rather than a neutral laboratory. Power exists in expertise, diagnosis, fees, documentation, institutional