The Postmodern & Social Justice Lineage

Every other lineage in psychotherapy, whatever its internal debates, shares a modernist assumption: there is a reality to be discovered, a pathology to be treated, an expert who knows. The postmodern lineage challenged all three. Drawing on Foucault's analysis of power, Derrida's deconstruction, Wittgenstein's language philosophy, and social constructionism, these therapists asked: Who defines "mental illness"? Whose knowledge counts? What is therapy doing when it diagnoses, interprets, and prescribes? The clinical result was a family of approaches — narrative therapy, solution-focused brief therapy, collaborative therapy, Open Dialogue — that rejected the expert position, privileged local knowledge, and treated language as constitutive of reality rather than a window onto it. The social justice extension — feminist therapy, relational-cultural therapy, liberation psychology — made explicit what was always implicit: therapy is political, and the personal is inseparable from the structural.