The politics and postmodern reinterpretations of clinical praxis: Espousing local understandings of distress

In this paper, inspired by a postmodern reconceptualization of truth and the deconstruction of objectivity, I critique the notion of western-inspired psychotherapy as neutral, universal, apolitical, and normative for all cultures and groups. This value-free idea of clinical praxis, I argue, would advantageously give way to understandings that re-vision the therapeutic encounter as a deeply political context – subject to the vulnerabilities of normal social interactions. Consequently, in view of increasingly credible ideas about the embeddedness of human experience, the subjectivity that must attend ‘scientific’ work, and the deconstruction of hegemonies as givens, I frame the crises currently facing orthodox psychotherapeutic praxis, and challenge its assumed superiority over local espousals of mental distress. This is done in the hope that a new space for more pluralistic forms of therapy might evolve unconstrained.