The Individual and the Group

Individualism and internalism tend to be the norm within almost all schools of psychotherapy, be they humanistic, cognitive, or analytic. While one might expect this of the individual psychotherapies, surprisingly, it is also the norm within many forms of group psychotherapy. To these ways of thinking, the sources of all social phenomena—racism, greed, hate, violence, love, empathy, whatever—are to be found in the internal worlds of individuals. This is born of the belief that social dynamics are driven by, and are expressions of, internal psychological dynamics. Psychotherapy, then, becomes primarily a project of reading clinical phenomena (the manifest) back into the psyche (the latent). To the author, this sort of belief system is both asocial as well as apolitical, which legitimates forms of practice that are also asocial and apolitical. He presents an alternative paradigm that takes power relations and an ethical sensibility to be central to the human condition. He does this by drawing on particular strands within philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This way of thinking leads to a reversal of individualism and the claim that the social is prior to the individual. This, in turn, has crucial consequences for how psychotherapy itself is practiced.