I’m currently reading The Future Is Not Lost: On Music, Technology and the Creation of New Worlds by Matt Bluemink and it has me thinking about a question Mark Fisher asked about music. Fisher was interested in what had happened to our experience of the future, particularly the cultural expectation that the future would arrive carrying things we had never encountered before. One of his provocations was, imagine taking a piece of contemporary music and playing it for someone twenty years earlier. Would they be shocked by what they heard? Would they have trouble making sense of it? Would it sound as though it had arrived from another world?
There was a time when the answer might have been yes. Certain moments in twentieth-century music seemed to come as breaks with what had preceded them. The distance between popular music in 1955 and 1975, or between 1965 and 1985, could feel enormous. Imagine hearing the Sex Pistols in 1955. New technologies, forms, subcultures, rhythms, and ways of organizing sound appeared. The future seemed capable of producing cultural objects that the present could not yet understand.
Fisher worried that something had changed. Contemporary culture had become increasingly adept at recycling its own archive. Styles returned and genres were recombined. Old sounds were polished and repackaged. There was plenty of new music, of course, but less of the sensation that something had appeared that could not have existed before. Fisher connected this to hauntology, a term he borrowed from Jacques Derrida and developed into an account of a culture increasingly haunted by futures that had once been anticipated but never arrived. The problem was not nostalgia. It was a disturbance in our relationship with historical time. The future no longer seemed capable of surprising us. I have begun wondering what happens if we perform Fisher’s experiment on psychotherapy.
Imagine that I could walk into my office twenty years ago and introduce myself to the Chris Hoff of 2006. I tell him I have come from the world of psychotherapy in 2026. After we get past the obvious questions, I tell him I want to show him what therapy looks like twenty years in the future. What could I show him that would genuinely shock him?
I could tell him about Internal Family Systems. He would encounter a sophisticated language of parts, multiplicity, internal relationships, and the organization of experience, but I am not sure he would experience it as something arriving from an incomprehensible future. I could tell him about somatic therapies and the renewed attention to bodily experience. I could describe the enormous influence of attachment theory and trauma. I could explain ACT, DBT, mindfulness-based interventions, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, EMDR, neuroscience-informed practice, and the many approaches that now describe themselves as integrative, relational, embodied, trauma-informed, or evidence-based.
Much has happened in the last 20 years. I do not want to dismiss these developments or ignore their differences. Some have changed clinical practice in consequential ways. Some have opened possibilities unavailable to people twenty years ago. Yet I still wonder whether any of them would leave the Chris of 2006 unable to recognize what he was seeing.
He would recognize the room and recognize the therapist and the client. He would recognize the problem. He would recognize the assumption that something called therapy occurs when a person experiencing difficulty meets with someone professionally authorized to help them understand, manage, heal, resolve, or transform that difficulty.
Even teletherapy would probably be less conceptually disruptive than technologically surprising. The screen would be new. The relationship would not. Perhaps the most startling development would be artificial intelligence. I would show him a person discussing grief, anxiety, relationships, or identity with an artificial intelligence system capable of producing something resembling therapeutic conversation. That might initially look like science fiction. Yet after watching for a while, he might notice something strange. A technology that would have seemed almost unimaginable in 2006 was being used to reproduce a recognizable therapeutic encounter. The technology had arrived from the future, but the form had not. A futuristic machine doing Carl Rogers is almost too perfect an image of Fisher’s hauntology. Still caught in the loop.
This doesn’t mean psychotherapy has remained unchanged all these years. Its history contains genuine conceptual disruptions. Freud and the early psychoanalysts did more than introduce another therapeutic technique. Psychoanalysis proposed a different kind of human subject: divided, opaque to itself, shaped by unconscious forces, desire, repression, memory, and conflict. Whatever one now thinks about psychoanalysis, it changed the kinds of questions that could be asked about a human life.
The second wave of family and systems therapists produced another disturbance. The problem might not reside inside the person at all. Bateson, Bowen, Minuchin, Satir, Whitaker, Haley, the Milan group, and others shifted attention toward relationships, communication, systems, patterns, contexts, and recursive processes. The identified patient could no longer be understood independently of the relational worlds in which the problem became understood. The consulting room expanded conceptually even when its physical walls remained in place.
The third wave of constructivist, feminist, social constructionist, postmodern, and poststructural approaches created another disruption. The individual and the family could not be treated as natural objects existing independently of language, culture, discourse, history, gender, race, class, institutions, and power. Narrative therapy, collaborative approaches, feminist therapies, and related traditions questioned the authority of professional knowledge itself. They asked who gets to describe reality, whose descriptions become legitimate, how identities are produced, and how therapeutic practice might participate in the very forms of power it claims to relieve.
These movements disagreed about a lot, but shared something. At their most interesting, they did not simply offer better ways to conduct therapy. They destabilized what therapists thought they were looking at. And then? That question interests me.
There have been countless developments since these movements. As we all know new models appear with regularity. Training institutes flourish and certifications multiply. Therapists learn new acronyms, interventions, protocols, and conceptual vocabularies. The psychotherapy marketplace is hardly stagnant. Yet proliferation is not the same thing as conceptual novelty. A field can generate enormous quantities of new material while remaining inside a remarkably stable imagination of what it is doing. Perhaps psychotherapy has entered its own hauntological period.
The ghosts are everywhere. Freud remains present even in approaches that reject psychoanalysis whenever we assume that a presenting difficulty conceals something deeper that must be discovered. Humanistic psychology remains whenever we speak about authenticity, growth, congruence, or becoming who we really are. Systems theory returns whenever distress is relocated from individuals into relational patterns. Postmodernism remains whenever therapists speak about stories, identities, meaning, discourse, or social context. Older organismic traditions echo through contemporary somatic language. Earlier theories of multiplicity return in the language of parts. Developmental explanations reappear through attachment. Neuroscience sometimes provides biological authorization for observations therapists have been making for decades.
None of this means these ideas are identical. Genealogies are not accusations and ideas change when they travel. Different practices produce different effects. My concern is with something underneath the proliferation of therapeutic models: the persistence of the therapeutic imaginary itself. A person has a problem. The problem belongs, in some meaningful sense, to the person. The person seeks professional help. The professional assesses or formulates the problem. An intervention is selected. Change is expected to occur. Progress is evaluated. The process ends when sufficient improvement has occurred. Even approaches that contest parts of this sequence often leave most of its architecture intact. We argue about what happens inside therapy while asking less often why helping has come to take this particular form.
This is where Fisher’s idea is helpful. Hauntology is not simply the claim that culture repeats itself. Fisher was interested in what happens when a culture loses its capacity to imagine futures qualitatively different from its present. The problem is not that nothing changes. Things change constantly. The problem is that change increasingly occurs inside established coordinates. Psychotherapy may have become extraordinarily innovative within the boundaries of psychotherapy. The harder question is whether it can imagine anything outside them. Perhaps the crisis facing psychotherapy is not that it has run out of techniques. Perhaps it has run out of futures.
There is another side of hauntology. Fisher’s ghosts were not only remnants of the past. They were traces of futures that had once seemed possible. The haunting came partly from what did not happen. Cultural forms carried memories of abandoned trajectories, roads history appeared ready to travel and then did not. Psychotherapy has its own lost futures.
There were moments in the history of therapy when the field seemed connected to a much larger project of rethinking how people might live together. The early family therapists did not simply develop techniques for treating families. They challenged the assumption that pathology belonged inside individual people. Feminist therapists asked whether suffering could be understood apart from gendered arrangements of power. Community psychology questioned the usefulness of treating individuals while leaving damaging environments untouched. Radical psychiatry and anti-psychiatry challenged the institutions authorized to determine who was normal, who was ill, and who required treatment. Liberation psychologies insisted that psychic suffering could not be separated from political and material conditions. Social constructionist and narrative practitioners questioned whether therapists possessed privileged access to the truth of other people’s lives. These were not competing clinical models. They contained different possible futures for helping. What became of those futures?
Some survived. Some developed in ways their founders did not anticipate. Many remained at the margins. But many others were absorbed into the very professional structures they had once placed under question. This is one of psychotherapy’s peculiar talents. It can metabolize critique.
A challenge to professional expertise becomes a workshop for professionals. A critique of individualism becomes an individual treatment modality. A political analysis of suffering becomes a clinical competency. A practice developed in opposition to diagnostic authority becomes something documented in the treatment plan. A movement becomes a model. The model becomes a certification. The certification becomes a professional identity. Eventually the rebellion becomes continuing education. On and on. Anybody else notice all the “deconstructing fill in the blank” workshops these days?
This is not necessarily the result of bad faith. Therapists need to make a living and institutions need ways to train people. Practices need to be taught, sustained, evaluated, and passed along. Professionalization can protect people from harm and preserve valuable forms of knowledge. Yet professionalization also changes the things it touches. Practices developed as critiques of institutions can become services offered by those institutions. Ideas intended to question expertise can become new forms of expertise. Movements concerned with social transformation can become methods for helping individuals adjust more successfully to the worlds those movements once hoped to change.
The result is not that radical ideas disappear. Something more interesting happens. They remain with us as ghosts. We continue to use their language. Context. Power. Relationship. Collaboration. Social justice. Liberation. Meaning. Community. But the institutional form in which those words are spoken often remains unchanged. The therapist still sits in the therapist’s chair. The client still sits in the client’s chair. The insurance company still asks for the diagnosis. The licensing board still determines who is authorized to practice. The treatment plan still locates the site of intervention. The fifty-five minutes still ends. This may be one of the more consequential lost futures of psychotherapy. There was once a stronger possibility that therapy might participate in changing the arrangements that produced suffering rather than primarily helping people survive them.
I do not want to romanticize this history. Earlier radical movements had their own exclusions, blind spots, hierarchies, and failures. Some of their experiments caused harm. Nor is there some pure revolutionary therapy waiting to be recovered from institutional corruption. Hauntology does not require that kind of nostalgia. The point is not that the past was better. The point is that the past contained futures. Some of them remain unfinished.
This changes the question I want to ask. I am less interested in what the next major school of psychotherapy will be. In fact, the expectation that another school should appear may itself belong to the old therapeutic imaginary. Psychoanalysis gives way to humanistic psychology, which gives way to systems approaches, cognitive therapies, postmodern therapies, trauma therapies, somatic therapies, and whatever comes next. The history becomes a succession of branded intellectual territories competing for clinicians, clients, legitimacy, and institutional recognition. But what if the next significant development does not look like another psychotherapy?
Let’s return to the thought experiment. What could I show the Chris of 2006 that would make him say, “I don’t think that’s therapy”? That seems a much more interesting threshold.
Perhaps there is no therapist.
Perhaps there is no client.
Perhaps there is no office.
Perhaps there is no diagnosis, treatment plan, or therapeutic hour.
Perhaps the distinction between helping and being helped becomes unstable.
Perhaps people gather temporarily around situations rather than presenting as individuals who possess problems. Friends, family members, neighbors, artists, organizers, teachers, elders, technologies, landscapes, objects, and institutions might become participants in practices of change. The unit of concern might cease to be “my anxiety” and become the world in which this particular anxiety has become possible, necessary, or sensible.
This would require something other than expanding our catalogue of interventions. It would require expanding our relational imagination: our capacity to imagine arrangements of people, practices, institutions, places, and possibilities that do not yet have established forms.
One possibility is that therapy might become less organized around repairing the past and more explicitly concerned with composing futures. Psychotherapy has always had a complicated relationship with time. Much of the field remains genealogical. What happened? Where did this begin? What did you learn in your family? What experience produced this pattern? What does this reaction remind you of? Even approaches that reject causal explanations often remain interested in histories: histories of problems, relationships, identities, trauma, resistance, meaning, and preferred ways of living.
These are important questions. But there is another temporal direction available to us.
What futures are currently organizing this person’s present?
Which futures have disappeared?
Which futures have become difficult to imagine?
Whose future is being treated as inevitable?
What possibilities have been defutured before they could be explored?
What conditions would make another future possible?
What could be rehearsed now?
Here therapy begins to encounter practices that have developed elsewhere: futures studies, scenario planning, speculative design, participatory inquiry, community organizing, philosophy, political theory, art, ritual, and world-making. The point would not be to import these practices and convert them into another therapeutic model. That would simply reproduce the familiar cycle. We would soon have certification programs in “Futures-Informed Therapy,” complete with competencies, branded diagrams, workbooks, and continuing education credits. That possibility makes me laugh because I can already imagine the conference brochure. And because it’s pretty much what I’m doing these days.
The more interesting possibility is allowing these encounters to alter therapy beyond recognition. Scenario work, for example, begins from a different relationship with uncertainty. Rather than attempting to predict what will happen, scenarios make multiple futures available for examination. They allow people to inhabit possibilities provisionally and ask what each future makes possible, what it forecloses, and what actions in the present might participate in bringing one future rather than another into being. The future stops being a destination waiting for us and becomes something already acting upon the present.
This matters clinically because people often arrive in therapy already living inside futures.
“I will always be alone.”
“My child will never forgive me.”
“I am going to fail.”
“This marriage cannot survive.”
“I will never become the person I thought I would be.”
These statements appear to describe the future, but they organize conduct in the present. Futures exert force. They invite some actions and make others difficult to perceive. They distribute hope, fear, agency, and resignation. They shape what can be noticed. A future-oriented therapeutic practice might therefore be concerned not simply with helping people feel better about the future but with examining how futures are produced, circulated, inhabited, contested, and composed.
This also raises a problem for those of us drawn to postmodern and poststructural therapies. We should not assume that because our traditions once represented a disruption, they remain disruptive. Narrative therapy can become haunted too.
A practice that questioned professional knowledge can acquire professional experts. A critique of fixed identity can become a recognizable therapeutic identity. Practices designed to remain responsive to local knowledge can become reproducible maps taught across contexts. Even anti-models can become models if repeated long enough. No tradition gets permanent exemption from institutionalization. Perhaps fidelity to the radical edge of these traditions requires something other than preserving them. Perhaps it requires allowing them to become vulnerable again to what they do not yet know.
That, for me, is where the question of the future becomes ethical rather than merely innovative. The task is not to invent a therapy nobody has seen before. It is to remain available to forms of helping that might disturb our existing categories, including the categories from which our own professional identities are built.
I am not arguing that therapy should abandon the consulting room, individual conversation, professional training, or the accumulated knowledge of the field. Nor do I think novelty is valuable simply because it is novel. Fisher’s work is more interesting than a demand for constant innovation. The question concerns our relationship to possibility. Have we become so accustomed to the existing organization of psychotherapy that we mistake its present form for the limits of helping itself?
Twenty years from now, I hope something exists that would confuse me. I hope someone could arrive from 2046 and show me a practice of helping that I would initially fail to recognize as therapy. Perhaps I would think it was education, art, politics, ritual, community, design, play, or something for which I did not yet have a category. Perhaps the people participating in it would find some of our current arrangements equally strange. They might find it curious that a person once sat alone in a room with a licensed professional every Tuesday at three o’clock to work on something called their mental health. They might wonder why distress was separated so thoroughly from housing, work, technology, climate, economics, community, place, politics, and the futures people believed were available to them. They might wonder why the person seeking help was called the client while everyone else remained outside. They might wonder why we spent so much time asking where problems came from and comparatively little time asking what worlds those problems were helping to produce.
And perhaps they would look back at our hundreds of therapeutic models, our certifications, our evidence bases, our treatment manuals, our competing theories of change, and see a field surrounded by ghosts. Not ghosts asking us to return to the past. Ghosts reminding us that other futures were once possible.
The work is not to recover some lost golden age of radical therapy. It is to recover the capacity to imagine helping otherwise. To recognize that psychotherapy as we currently practice it is not the inevitable endpoint of a century of progress. It is one historical arrangement among others, produced under particular economic, professional, institutional, and cultural conditions. It can therefore be otherwise.
I would like therapy to become strange again. Not strange for the sake of novelty, but strange because we have once again become capable of imagining forms of helping that the present cannot completely understand. Perhaps the question is not what comes after psychotherapy. Perhaps the question is whether psychotherapy can make enough room for something it cannot yet recognize.
Something that would make the Chris of 2026 pause twenty years from now and say: I don’t know what that is. But I want to know more.
Peace.
The process of writing this essay was human writer first and human editor last. I used generative AI for ideation, research and spellchecking. Pass judgement accordingly.
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If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.
October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.
I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.
And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.
Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available
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Chris, thank you for writing such a thought-provoking piece. I find myself wondering why we don't consider the future as a force that shapes people's present experiences, and what possible futures exist for the field of therapy. Can therapy be more than what it is today? Can we imagine forms of therapy that move beyond the current model? What would it look like if there were no individual therapy, no 50-minute sessions, and no expert knowledge? How would helping another look, feel, and take shape? What new meanings and possible futures might emerge?
If I could imagine one thing therapy could do differently, it would be to create training environments where therapists learn alongside people from different disciplines. I imagine a training center staffed by individuals who hold knowledge in poetry, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and other domains. What might happen if therapy moved beyond its current training model and embraced a broader range of ways of knowing?
Much to wonder about and imagine. Peace.
What a thrilling read — thank you. I will be thinking about hauntology now for a long while. It's so applicable to basically any other domain of human knowledge and community that struggles in the tensions of what was past, what is present, and how to create imaginative reality together. So all domains, by that standard, ha.
Have you read Walter Brueggemann's The Prophetic Imagination? From the domain of theology / Judeo-Christian textual scholarship, but just such a powerhouse argument for the role of imagination and its native vocabulary in emancipation. Builds on Ricoeur's work so poetically.
I was also thinking about Matthew Ichihashi Potts and his "modest" work on forgiveness which took a really tough and problematic concept that often gets manifested as the antithesis of trauma-informed / story-informed companionship to harm and suffering. He somehow relocates the whole idea of forgiveness back in narrative that is allied to the future instead of the past. A way to reshape the future while living with an inalterable past, to roughly quote. Super tricky tightrope to walk but the future focus of his argument still has me thinking about it. Again, a Judeo-Christian POV, but I think interesting philosophical and therapeutic grist.