Viewpoint: A return to radical relationality
Therapy Today, March 2026.

The cultures, traditions and times to which we belong shape the values, theories and practices that therapists embrace – or, more tellingly, overlook. In my previous book, Workplace Wellbeing: a relational approach, I explored the emotional challenges of modern workplaces.¹ I had hoped that the kind of fragile, attentive relationship fostered in therapy might transform workplaces in meaningful ways. Yet I came to realise that both the therapy room and the workplace are shaped by the same cultural legacy: a world view that prizes individuality, autonomy and self-mastery. 

Our secular therapeutic models, born from Western thought – ancient Hellenic philosophy, Roman imperialism and Christian moral frameworks – risk reinforcing the very ills they aim to remedy. In an era when people long for embodied connection, meaningful community and ethical purpose, what have we offered? More selfimprovement, more empowerment and more self-mastery – often to those already exhausted by a culture that measures worth by material achievement. And if you fail to ‘make it’, the fault is made entirely your own. Therapy, in this sense, can reflect our ailing culture rather than illuminate a path beyond it. 

Don’t forget 

This brings us to a deeper concern: what does our profession risk becoming if we forget this? Can we recover before our good intentions slide into moral relativism leaving clients – and therapists – disenchanted? Modern therapy leans towards individualistic fixes for age-old human problems. Yet climate change, pandemics, political upheaval and isolation remind us that life stretches beyond the solitary self. Liberal individualism reads our interdependence as weakness. Larkin knew it well: to lean on others is hard, but to hold fast to the sovereign self is all too easy.² 

The seemingly neutral act of inviting clients into our consulting rooms assumes that problems reside within them – their psyches, brains or personalities. The contexts in which these difficulties arise – home, work, community – are sometimes treated as secondary rather than constitutive. Such assumptions are so embedded they rarely come under scrutiny.³ At the same time, liberal humanism encourages freedom as a rejection of constraints, which undermines ethical responsibility towards others. Ironically, integrative and eclectic approaches, in avoiding dogma, may inadvertently leave therapists free to exercise power without awareness, becoming abstract moral spectators rather than engaged participants in the ethical flow of human relationships.

If contemporary therapy risks narrowing into techniques for the isolated self, then perhaps what we need is not another method for our ‘toolbox’, but a different starting point altogether. This is where a turn towards radical relationality becomes not just helpful but necessary. 

Radical relationality 

Most schools of therapy acknowledge the importance of the therapeutic relationship, but we often approach it from within a culture that assumes we are individuals first and relaters second. The self comes first; relationships matter only as far as they serve individual goals. Freud helped shape the idea of a self that stands apart – walled off, objective and detached. In this framework the therapist’s task is to help free the self from itself and from the values taken from others. The relationship becomes a backdrop, a conduit for the ‘real material’ of therapy – emotions, thoughts, memories, stories, the unconscious – rather than the medium in which transformation emerges. Like the old scientific notion of æther, the invisible substance once believed to carry light through empty space, relationships are taken as essential but unseeable. Yet they are what makes meaning possible.

I recently argued that relationality needs to be taken far more seriously.⁴ ‘Radical’ does not mean new; it comes from the Latin radix, meaning ‘root’. Relationality is not simply about being warm or building rapport, however deeply these may be felt. Radical relationality is an ontological claim: meaningful change emerges within the relational field. This matters all the more today, when AI systems mimic some of the surface gestures of warmth and rapport. If relating becomes reduced to tone, timing or conversational fluency, then machines may soon do it better. 

Radical relationality reminds us that therapy’s ground is not mimicry but presence – a living, responsive attunement arising between people. Therapists and clients recognise this in the subtle rhythms of attention that can take shape across any medium: the pauses, hesitations, gestures, silences and shared moments that no algorithm can genuinely inhabit. Many come to therapy seeking precisely this form of human presence, often without having the words to describe it. Radical relationality makes visible an insight long known yet quietly overlooked: the relationship is not a backdrop to transformation – it is its ground. 

Merleau-Ponty shows that the body is not an object we carry about with us but the medium through which meaning appears.⁵ Things, events, bodies, even time and space, are not things we encounter; they are and have always been entwined. Understanding another is a relational achievement. In practice this might mean noticing how a client’s hand trembles when a painful memory surfaces, their breath catching mid-sentence, or the atmosphere in the room beginning to shift. These changes are not observations of an isolated self – they are the conversation unfolding in the relational field. Sometimes it is not what is said but how time moves differently. In those moments meaning emerges between. 

Gadamer reminds us that understanding is always relational – never achieved by one person alone. It requires more than listening to words; it requires sensing presence – the body, breath, the subtle rhythms arising between therapist and client.⁶ Therapy often begins where words cannot reach, with a felt disturbance, a sense that something no longer fits. Time drags or races, the body feels heavy or alien and ordinary places take on a subtle strangeness. In these moments simply remaining present becomes the medium through which meaning can emerge. 

Ethical turn 

This recognition reshapes the ethical ground of our work. If therapy remains aligned with the assumptions of liberal individualism, it risks overlooking the web of relationships that make life possible and meaningful. Much of 20th-century humanism carries its own blind spots here. The central concern has long been the self determining individual – a morally self-contained unit whose inner sentiment is treated as the final arbiter of value. In this frame, ethics rests within the sovereign individual. The writings of many notable therapy figures carried profound emancipatory force in their historical moment, even if its emphasis on the autonomous self now shows its limits. Radical relationality does not reject the humanistic tradition; it carries forward its most life-affirming impulse in which selves are, and have always been, entwined. 

This becomes a significant ethical question: to ask what, in practice, we take a good life to be. When the self is pictured as freestanding, therapy risks narrowing into self-enhancement or self-management rather than an enquiry into how to live through, with and for others. A therapist’s choice of theory is never neutral: every orientation carries a vision of being human and thus is an image of what it means to live well. To choose a model is therefore to take a moral stance, whether acknowledged or not. 

What vision of the human being should guide our work? Radical relationality turns the question inside out: neither the self nor good practice can be lifted out of context. They emerge only within relationships – the living, interdependent field in which therapist and client come to know themselves and one another. 

Rather than rooting ethics in an autonomous core, it locates moral life in the fabric of relationships and traditions, where responsibility, care and responsiveness take shape. In this context philosophy is encountered not as an academic subject but as a way of thinking that helps the therapist navigate complexity. When organisations or therapists speak of their philosophy they often mean a doctrine: a set of rules for getting on or for getting by. Confusing the two leaves therapeutic practice incomplete. Repeating doctrine without questioning its foundation leaves no room for wisdom, and wisdom begins in seeing that we do not possess it. 

Engaging philosophically is demanding work: there are no shallow ends to this pool. Life, as it is given to us, cannot be easily explained – yet the questions it poses are precisely those that therapy is called to face. Human reality is too complex for us to ignore the philosophical assumptions that shape how we think about ethics, theory and method. 

Radical practice 

I am attempting to keep this conversation open – grounding therapeutic practice not in method but in the fragile, powerful presence through which meaning becomes possible. Distress often arrives as shifts in someone’s felt world, such as the slowed heaviness of depression, the splintered time of trauma, the control of disrupted eating, the looping urgency of obsession, the uncanny pressure of altered perception or the quiet ache of grief. Sometimes these disturbances appear before words are spoken. In such moments our task is to remain present, inhabit the splintered time, the looping dread, the weight of shame, and let the world that presses on them rest in the space between us. 

Straus observed this vividly in his clinical work: disturbances are not merely problems sealed inside an individual but are shifts in how space, time, body and others are encountered. What helps is not technique alone but the attentiveness we bring to each moment. A phenomenologicalhermeneutic perspective reminds us that healing begins when we remain present: listening with the whole body, attending to pauses, gestures and silences, sensing when meaning is trying to take form. It is less a matter of searching for a cure, and more a way of helping the world become liveable again. 

Reflections 

Having had the privilege of being a therapist, supervisor and trainer for more than two decades I am convinced that the seeds of radical relationality have always been in the wind, waiting to take root. Relationships do not simply support therapy – they are therapy; the only true harbour in life’s sea of troubles. To tend this relational ground is not to offer solutions but to help life emerge in ways that can only be glimpsed, together.