Abstract

The operation of power within psychotherapeutic practice is explored in this article through an analysis of radio therapeutic discourse. A Foucauldian methodological approach is adopted where the operation of power is conceptualized in terms of practices concerning the constitution and regulation of the self and which employs the analytics of problematization and ethical self-formation. Ten complete calls were examined for the effect of therapeutic intervention on callers' accounts of their problems; two calls are reported in detail. It was found that through therapeutic problematization callers' worries were restructured so that the locus of concern was shifted towards the caller's relationship with themselves, in particular providing the means through which callers might regulate their own behaviour and normalize their future possible conduct. In this way callers were invited to account for themselves as both the target of and the responsible agent in their own cure. Thus power is linked with psychotherapeutic practice — in this setting — through the production of certain kinds of person with certain kinds of responsibilities. Finally, it is argued that here the psychotherapeutic process is more moral than `psychological' and that the ethical operation of therapeutic discourse is linked to our contemporary `therapeutic' moral order.