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206 The Professional Counselor \ Volume 1, Issue 1 Even within a collaborative partnership, however, Mahoney (1995) argues that while clients show a degree of autonomy, this “does not negate the fact that clients’ values in some domains may be significantly influenced by the values expressed, affirmed and challenged by the professional practitioner” (p. 393). Taking note of this reality, Anderson (1997) posits that the focus in a collaborative approach to therapy is on the relationship system between client and counselor in which both the expertise of the client and that of the counselor combine and merge. While Anderson (1997) conceives of the respective domains of expertise as easily discernible—client as expert in his or her life experiences and counselor as expert in the area of the dialogical process—even this seems a false dichotomy. Whether or not the counselor is willing to recognize it, he or she cannot relinquish power over the domain of the client’s narrative. Even in the questions the counselor poses and those parts of the narrative that he or she chooses to attend to in detail, there exist relations of power that may serve to either reify or challenge the dominant discursive regimes of truth therein. Holding to a close Foucauldian understanding of power and knowledge, Brown (2007) notes that a narrative therapeutic stances must move away from the binary notion that one may either have power and knowledge or not. Instead, the counselor must be clear in recognizing that both the counselor and client are “active embodied subjects in the therapeutic process of coauthoring identities” (Brown, 2007, p. 3). Far from the objective neutrality of the modernist stance and the oversimplified not- knowing abdication of power in some postmodern approaches, Brown (2007) sees the necessity of being positioned and taking a stance as a vital in narrative therapy. “In my view,” she states, “it is far more dangerous to deny the presence of our own knowledge and power through efforts at sidestepping it” (Brown, 2007, p. 12). Above all, and despite the politics and goals of any particular therapeutic alliance, Brown (2007) states the unequivocal positioning of the counselor as one of ethical responsibility for the well-being of the client. Conclusion It is clear from this examination that questions of power and knowledge in clients’ narratives, as well as within the therapeutic alliance, are subjects of lively debate and clarity is not easily gained. Partially, this difficulty seems to stem from the reality that knowledge and power often operate in implicit ways within the regimes of truth that are so often taken for granted as normative ways of understanding. What seems clear, however, is that narrative counselors hoping to be true to postmodern conceptualizations of power and knowledge—at least Foucauldian understandings—must continue to recognize the relations of power and knowledge at play in the therapeutic alliance. Rather than attempting to divest oneself of power, one must instead recognize that relations of power are unavoidable and that the counselor is always positioned in relations of power with the client. What might be stated with some degree of certainty is that relations of power and knowledge are unavoidable and inescapable, even for those practicing narrative, collaborative- based, postmodern therapies. The determining factor for how power and knowledge will be experienced as constraining, constitutive, oppressive, liberative, limiting or emancipatory is the degree to which the counselor is willing to recognize her or his own involvement in relations of power and position herself or himself within those dynamics of power and knowledge, recognizing all the while that the act of therapy is, indeed, a political act. References Anderson, H. (1997). Conversation, language, and possibilities: A postmodern approach to therapy . New York, NY: BasicBooks. Brown, C. (2007). Situating knowledge and power in the therapeutic alliance. In C. Brown & T. Agusta-Scott (Eds.), Narrative therapy: Making meaning, making lives (3–22). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Foucault, M. (1977/1994). Truth and power. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power (pp. 111–133, R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: The New Press. Foucault, M. (1977/1997). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison . (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (1982/1994). The subject and power. In J. D. Faubion (Ed.), Power (pp. 326–348, R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: The New Press. Held, B. S. (1995). Back to reality: A critique of postmodern theory in psychotherapy . New York, NY: WW Norton. Holzman, L. F., Newman, F., & Strong, T. (2004). Power, authority, and pointless activity: The developmental discourse of social therapy.” In T. Strong & D. Paré (Eds.), Furthering talk: Advances in the discursive therapies (pp. 73–86). New York, NY: Kluwer Academic/Plenum.