Working With Power in Existential Therapy
Keywords:
Power, existential therapy, interrelated personhood, subjectivity Power is a key area of concern in therapy, and all therapists will be aware of the inherent power differential in a therapy relationship. Yet considerations of discourses of power can work with an assumption that power is a reified entity, a ‘commodity’, which some parties have, such as the state or those in authority, and which others lack. Foucault rightly challenges this reified idea of power. According to him: power in the substantive sense, le pouvoir, does not exist.Abstract
Drawing on a typology of different ways in which power is exercised, this article makes the argument that given the distinctive understanding of the human subject as an interrelated person in existential therapy, there follows a distinctive understanding of how power can be conceived and positively exercised in the therapy relationship.
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Published
2021-07-01
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