Towards a Radical Therapeutic Practice

Abstract

All the illustrations of Chapter 4 struggle in one way or another with the dominant discourse of the therapist as the ‘knower’, the professional expert who possesses knowledge and insight, a discourse that encourages fear, exaggerated dependency and passivity in clients and omnipotence and narcissism in workers. The authors would agree with most left-wing critics of psychiatry that this is a regrettable state of affairs. However, we believe that it is inadequate to respond by simply producing a discourse that opposes the dominant one at each point by stating that workers are not experts, should not be professionals, and so on. In the first section of this chapter, ‘Challenging the Dominant Therapeutic Discourse’, it is argued that a straightforward oppositional position is no substitute for analysis that separates out the positive and negative functions of the power relations inscribed by discourse. Rather, as proposed in The Acceptance of Power’ and ‘The Refusal of Power’, radical practice must involve the subversion of discourse in a manner which maximises the positive possibilities for change, and this entails working with problems instead of acting as though they did not exist.