Postmodern & Social Justice Comparisons

Comparing narrative, solution-focused, collaborative, feminist and relational-cultural approaches.

The postmodern lineage rejects the premise most of this site’s taxonomy runs on: that a problem is located inside a person and can be classified. It holds instead that problems are constituted in language, in relationships and in the arrangements people live under, and that a therapy which treats them as individual pathology is doing something political whether or not it admits it.

That makes comparison inside this family unusually substantive, and comparison across the boundary unusually sharp. These pages take both seriously: what separates narrative from solution-focused practice when both externalize the problem, and what a postmodern clinician is actually objecting to when they decline a diagnostic formulation.

44 comparisons · 9 within the same tradition · 35 across traditions


Across traditions

Comparisons where the two approaches disagree about what a person is, not only about technique.

Within the same tradition

Comparisons between approaches that share a worldview and differ in method or emphasis.


Other comparison hubs