TPC-Journal-V1-Issue3

The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 205 power. While some would seek to divest the relationship of power altogether, this is a naïve and potentially harmful way of viewing power in the therapeutic alliance. As White and Epston (1990) warn: If we accept that power and knowledge are inseparable…and if we accept that we are simultaneously undergoing the effects of power and exercising power over others, then we are unable to take a benign view of our own practices. Nor are we able simply to assume that our practices are primarily determined by our motives, or that we can avoid all participation in the field of power/knowledge through and examination of such personal motives. (p. 29) Instead of an avoidance of the power and knowledge relations implicit in the therapeutic alliance, these authors suggest that narrative counselors must assume that we are always participating in such relations. Rather than avoiding this reality or trying to cover it over with a completely “not-knowing” position, White and Epston (1990) suggest that we critique our own practices and identify the contexts of ideas from which our practices come. This, they argue, enables the narrative counselor to identify effects, dangers and limitations in their ideas and practices and turns their attention toward the keen awareness that social control—though avoided—is always a strong possibility within the therapeutic alliance. White and Epston (1990) further argue that if we are to “accept Foucault’s proposal that the techniques of power that ‘incite’ persons to constitute their lives through ‘truth’…, then, in joining with persons to challenge these practices, we also accept that we are inevitably engaged in a political activity” (p. 29). Foucault (1994b) explains the nature of truth that must be challenged through the political activity of the counselor in this way: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. (p. 131) While White and Epston (1990) admit that the political activity of the narrative counselor does not involve proposing an alternative ideology to that implicit in the regime of truth, they do propose that the counselor challenges the techniques that subjugate clients to a dominant ideology. This involves what Brown (2007) argues is an acceptance of one’s position by which counselors acknowledge, rather than deny, their own knowledge and power and become more accountable for them. What alternative exists, then, to the “not-knowing” position advocated for by many narrative and postmodern therapies? Brown (2007) notes that while a not-knowing position seeks to maximize clients’ power by positioning them as “expert,” “they often implicitly require practitioners to abdicate their own knowledge and power” in the process (p. 8). She further explains the problematic nature of the not-knowing position as one that (1) risks passivity and (2) involves little active problem solving or analysis on the counselor’s part. “In the first instance,” Brown (2007) argues, “expert knowledge and power, while practiced, are denied; and, in the second, the therapist is rendered virtually ineffective for fear of being too knowledgeable or too powerful” (p. 13). In a far more critical tone, Barbara Held (1995) posits that the antirealism within postmodern therapies “affords therapists…a legitimate way to diminish the discipline’s complexity, by diminishing if not eliminating what therapists need to know in advance of each case” (p. 14). Brown (2007) argues that in order to practice effectively, the narrative counselor must have knowledge and power. The issue, then, is how knowledge and power are recognized and deployed in the therapeutic alliance. Winslade, Crocket, and Monk (1997) offer the image of coauthoring narratives within a collaborative relationship as a possibility for abandoning the all-knowing, but remaining free from the ineffective not-knowing position. Coauthoring, they postulate, “implies a shared responsibility for the shaping of the counseling conversation…[and] challenges the portrayal of counselors as followers, who must be very cautious about treading on the toes of clients” (Winslade, Crocket, & Monk, 1997, p. 55). At the same time, it challenges a modernist view of the counselor as a wise, all-knowing expert. In the collaborative relationship described by these authors, narrative counselors develop an awareness of aspects of professional discourse that set up harmful relations of power and authority and leave the client with little sense of agency. Instead, client and counselor take a position against the problems and deficit-inducing discourses and in this way create a relationship in which power is used in a positive manner in which the client has a voice that is offered legitimacy by the counselor’s hearing. Anderson (1997) further describes this collaborative therapeutic alliance as a partnership between people with different perspectives and expertise.