Practicing Method: Social Therapy as Practical–Critical Psychology

Abstract

What Marx referred to as “practical–critical, revolutionary practice” has been shaped into a human development practice of method, that is, social therapeutics, and its psychotherapy, social therapy. Both entail the communal and reconstructive activity of human beings exercising their power qualitatively to transform the current state of things, the transformation of the world and of ourselves being one and the same task. This practice is discussed as an ontological critique of mainstream psychology and psychotherapy, representing a move from critical (opposition, resistance, and destruction or deconstruction) to practical–critical (creating something new out of what exists, reconstruction/deconstruction).