TPC-Journal-V1-Issue3

202 The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 Michael White and David Epston (1990), proponents of the turn to postmodern thought in counseling, argue that social scientists turned very early on to the positivist physical sciences for examples upon which to base their own work in the interpretation of the social systems. This, they believed, would provide necessary legitimacy for their own work as a science. This positivist commitment leads counselors into the process of observing, describing and explaining human behavior in ways that are deemed objective and places them in the position of master observer describing and assessing the client’s story as it “ really is and ought to be” (Anderson, 1997, p. 31). According to Anderson (1997), this places both counselor and client on the hierarchy of knowledge and truth, marking the client as the subject of inquiry and observation and the counselor as the superior expert observer. In this modern construction of the therapeutic alliance, counselor and client are “separate static entities…and not interactive participants in a joint endeavor” (Anderson, 1997, p. 32). Furthermore, the language often used to describe the client’s reality is a deficiency-based language assumed to be an accurate representation of behavioral and mental reality. It is a turn away from this pursuit of a hierarchy of knowledge and the positivist search for objective reality that is at the heart of narrative therapy’s conceptualization of knowledge and power. What narrative, collaborative-based and nearly all postmodern models of therapy hold in common is the belief that an objective reality that stands apart from the knowing subject can never be fully arrived upon. Simon (1994) postulates, “The first, and perhaps defining attitude of postmodernism is the belief that knowledge is power and hidden concepts may exist in a theory or text that justifies the use of power” (p. 2). Narrative theorists are indebted to Michel Foucault, notes Catrina Brown (2007), when it comes to Foucault’s “insistence on the inseparability of power and knowledge and his efforts to study the way humans govern and regulate themselves and others through the production of truth” (p. 3). By way of Foucault and a myriad of other philosophers who influenced the postmodern critique of modernism, narrative theorists see through “a postmodern lens” in which knowledge is not hierarchical, objective or observable by an expert; rather it is “multiple and only ever partial” and “understood to be socially and historically specific and inseparable from social relations of power” (Brown, 2007, p. 5). Foucault (1977/1994) attempts to trace how hierarchies of power are constructed in modernist thought and to uncover their effects on individuals. He sees the process of power relations taking place when modes of inquiry try to give themselves the status of sciences through objectivizing ways of approaching subjects under study. Secondly, Foucault (1982/1994) points to “dividing practices” within society and scientific disciplines that seek to divide the subject inside him- or herself or from others. Finally, he points to the ways in which individual human beings are made into subjects through these practices. In examining the power relations at work in this process, he states: This form of power that applies itself to immediate everyday life categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him that he must recognize and others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power that makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependency, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to. (Foucault, 1982/ 1994, p. 331) This understanding of power and knowledge put forth by Foucault is not the repressive power of force so commonly spoken of in everyday uses of the term “power.” Rather, as White and Epston (1990) point out, “Foucault argues that we predominantly experience the positive or constitutive effects of power, that we are subject to power through normalizing ‘truths’ that shape our lives and relationships” (p. 19). This power makes us into subjects by delimiting the ways in which we are able to conceive of our identities; it provides the language with which we determine the content of our self- knowledge and self-concepts. Foucault (1977/1997) argues that we must cease describing power in negative, repressive terms and instead see that “it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represses,’ it ‘censors,’ it ‘abstracts,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact,” says Foucault, “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (p. 194). White and Epston (1990) explain that Foucault is postulating ideas about human beings that claim the status of objective truth are, in fact, constructed ideas that are given the status of truth. These “truths” are then used as the norms around which persons shape or constitute their lives, thus making them subjects. White and Epston (1990) further state that this subjugating knowledge “forges persons as ‘docile bodies’ and conscripts them into activities that support the proliferation of ‘global’ and ‘unitary’ knowledges, as well as the techniques of power” (p. 20). Thus, power as Foucault describes it is inseparable from knowledge and is sometimes represented in Foucault’s writing as “power/knowledge” or “knowledge/power.” This construction of power/knowledge in the work of Foucault and in postmodern thought in