Situating Knowledge and Power in the Therapeutic Alliance

The narrative process of re-authoring identities requires moving beyond simply telling and retelling stories to an active deconstruction of oppressive and unhelpful discourses. Unpacking unhelpful stories and creating alternative preferred stories involves recognizing the relationship between knowledge and power, as knowledge and power are joined through discourse (Foucault, 1980a). The postmodern sensibility of narrative therapy is contingent upon Foucault’s insistence on the inseparability of power and knowledge and his efforts to study the way humans govern and regulate themselves and others through the production of truth. Narratives then, are “not only structures of meaning but structures of power as well” (Bruner, 1986, p. 144). Rethinking modernist approaches to knowledge and power challenges the ways in which both practitioners and clients may inadvertently keep oppressive stories alive. Drawing upon Foucault’s understanding of the inseparability of knowledge and power, I adopt the therapeutic stance that knowledge is never innocent and power is never just constraining. This therapeutic stance moves away from the binary idea that either one has knowledge or one does not and either one has power or one does not. Disrupting modernist binary constructions of knowledge and power recognizes both the therapist and client as active embodied subjects in the therapeutic process of coauthoring identities.