Our review of socialist humanism has shown how a progressive approach can be developed with psychological understandings at its heart, and it introduced concepts that can be valuable to such an analysis. The aim of this chapter is to develop these starting points into a fully fleshed out psychological framework that can serve as the basis for a contemporary progressive vision for society. This framework, therefore, retains several key elements of a socialist humanist approach – for instance, conceptualising people as agentic but with unrealised needs and wants – but it is also integrative of a wider range of contemporary psychological theories, practices, and findings.

Why might it be important to spell out such a psychological framework to a progressive audience? Could we not, for instance, just skip to the practical applications of a psychology-informed progressivism? In this chapter, psychological theory is, deliberately, presented at a level of depth, detail, and complexity. This is because the kind of progressive perspective being proposed in this book is not just about how we behave. Rather, it is also about how we think, feel, and relate to each other – at the deepest possible level. The principle of radical acceptance, for instance, is not so much a way of acting towards another as a particular stance or understanding. So, to develop such a foundation, we need to go into the psychological theory and consider the very nature of human being. By the end of this chapter, then, readers should have an understanding of people that can underpin and support a psychology-informed progressive vision. My hope is also that this chapter will encourage progressives to think psychologically: to deeply ask, for themselves and for others, what might be going on at the level of thinking, feeling, and experiencing.

This framework is based on an analysis developed in my book Integrating counselling and psychotherapy: Directionality, synergy, and social change. That book is specifically for therapists but, if you are interested in the framework and its clinical application, you can find out more there. The framework is not a radically ‘alternative’ or new way of thinking about mind and behaviour. Rather, what the framework does is to try and find a way of drawing together, and articulating, the basic principles underlying many different psychological and therapeutic perspectives and research findings.