TPC-Journal-V1-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 203 general prompts Neimeyer (1995) to claim that the modern notion of an existential self—“an individual ego who is the locus of choice, action, and rational self-appraisal” (p. 13)—no longer carries any weight in a landscape influenced by postmodernism. Holzman, Newman, and Strong (2004) argue that some counselors and theorists have attempted to avoid the topic of power altogether, believing it to be the fundamental flaw of modernism. Postmodern theories such as narrative therapy, however, cannot simply eliminate power by denying its presence. Anderson (1997) views narrative, collaborative-based, postmodern therapies taking account of power by recognizing within the therapeutic relationship how power evolves from interaction between the client and others (including the counselor) and through communication between persons. She states, “Knowledge, including self-knowledge or self-narrative, is a communal construction, a product of social exchange…From this perspective ideas, truths, or self-identities, for instance, are the products of human relationships. That is, everything is authored, or more precisely, multi-authored, in a community of persons and relationships” (Anderson, 1997, p. 41). The intended focus of the remainder of this exploration is to locate issues of power and knowledge within clients’ narratives and to examine how narrative therapy approaches these relations of power, as well as to examine the dynamics of power and knowledge that exist within the therapeutic alliance and the ways in which narrative counselors conceive of and deal with these relations of power. Power and Knowledge in Clients’ Narratives The telling of stories by clients is a key component of nearly every theory of counseling and psychotherapy. Whether one attends to the unconscious psychodynamics, the rationality of thought processes, the behavioral outcomes, or the affective dimensions of a client’s story largely depends upon one’s theoretical orientation. From a narrative perspective, Brown (2007) suggests that hearing clients’ narratives must move beyond a simple telling of clients’ stories “to an active deconstruction of oppressive and unhelpful discourses” (p. 3). As postmodern critique has demonstrated, the relationship between knowledge and power is inextricable and takes shape in the form of discursive systems in which individuals are divided, classified and come to author their lives through narrative components that are available within dominant discourse. Discourses, Brown (2007) reminds us, are both constituting—giving us language and concepts by which we come to know ourselves as subjects—and constraining—allowing some stories to be told and affirmed and others to be hidden and overlooked. The process of deconstruction in therapy involves the analysis of these discourses and the “hidden element of power in all organized systems of knowledge” (Simon, 1994, p. 2), making relations of power clear and bringing them into the awareness of those involved with a system of knowledge. Bringing to awareness the hidden elements of power and the effects of discourse on the lives of clients does not have as its aim escape from relations of power. Indeed, escape from power relations is impossible. Awareness of these relations of power within systems of knowledge, however, allows for a fuller range of actions to be taken by the client and uncovers diverse narratives that are often subjugated or hidden by the normalizing effect of discourse. In this way, Winslade, Crocket, and Monk (1997) point to the significance of listening closely to a client’s story—so closely, one would presume, as to hear the hidden elements of power and the effects of discourse. They indicate that the act of listening calls for the power of the counselor to be concentrated toward the legitimization of the client’s voice where it has been previously excluded and denied. Foucault was closely attentive to the knowledges within society that are silenced due to the fact that the voices of some (inmates in prisons, patients in mental hospitals, etc.) are never given a hearing. He called these “subjugated knowledges” (Jardine, 2005, p. 21). Indeed, power and knowledge in the practice of narrative therapy can be largely located within the narrative the client brings into the consultation room. Brown (2007) argues that the work of the narrative counselor is to unpack and reconstruct these stories, rather than leaving them intact, as these narratives so often reflect dominant discourses and relations of power. She further states that power can never be left out of the work of narrative therapy and that this particular approach is a highly politicized work that seeks to challenge oppression. Rather than inherent truths of early modernist therapies, narrative therapy is interested in the construction of stories. As a part of this interest in construction, narrative therapists are interested in the ways larger discourses—often presumed to be truth—are taken up by clients as formative in their own narratives. Culturally available discourses that shape and form clients’ narratives in various ways are often the sites of the deconstructive work of narrative counselors.