Re: Power and Neutrality

At 02:11 PM 2/9/97 -0800, Miles Jackson wrote:

<my prior post deleted>

>How is what psychotherapists do like Foucault's work? Perhaps
>I am simplifying, but isn't most therapy more or less hermeneutics--
>looking for the "deep" meaning beneath the surface? This search for
>the underlying meaning of things like language and discourse is exactly
>the philosophical viewpoint that Foucault rails against in most of his
>books (see esp. arch. of knowledge). For Foucault, psychotherapy is
>a social practice and related discourse that we need to analyze (to
>understand, for instance, how various psychological types of individuals
>are produced in our society). I don't see how psychotherapy could be
>something that mirrors, say, Foucault's history of sexuality without
>undermining the guiding assumptions of therapeutic practice/discourse.
>
>Miles Jackson
>cqmv@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>mjackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>

What I had in mind when I compared psychotherapy to Foucault's work is the
general process of trying to understand the forces in one's life that have
shaped one's personality or character. For example, the "politics of the
family", to borrow a term from the title of one of RD Laing's books, would
be representative of the forces that I was thinking of. The parallel I saw
was around this project of trying to understand a person's history in terms
of the micro-powers that have been most active in his or her life. I don't
dispute Foucault's point that the process of psychotherapy, itself, can be
part of the powers that need to be examined. But this seems similiar to the
issue of whether Foucault's own work also needs to be reflected upon as part
of the very Knowlege/Power processes that he is trying to analyse and bring
more to light.

John Sproule




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