The Dynamics of Power

Richard Mowbray's article, 'Organic growth' (Counselling News, September issue), along with his refreshing and sorely needed book The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration, constitute a most welcome counterweight (or even antidote) to the largely unquestioned and intemperate stampede into registration- and accreditation-mindedness that has been sweeping the fields of counselling and psychotherapy in recent times. As Richard honestly admits in his article, and like many others in the humanistic field, I too have previously been politically naive enough to assume the arguments against professionalising a field centred on human development and healing to be so self-evident and overwhelming that no-one with any degree of integrity or understanding of the nature of personal growth could countenance even for a moment the kinds of extraordinary changes that have been occurring in recent years. How wrong we have all been, and recent developments (UKCP, BAC, NVQs et al.) have certainly wrenched us out of our erstwhile complacency in no uncertain terms. Whether enough of us have woken up in time to the nightmare scenario that could conceivably ensue were the compelling logic of bureacratic professionalisation fully to play itself out (deadened practice, stifled creativity, a 'gentrified' profession with astronomical training costs and exorbitant client fees to match, an intellectually dominated, over-academic approach to emotional difficulties, a de facto medicalised therapeutic ontology...) remains to be seen.

Whether those deeply implicated in the process of professionalising the field will even begin to listen to the persuasive logic of Mowbray's Case must be open to severe doubt, given the enormous vested training interests involved and the self-serving bureaucratic momentum that has built up over recent years - driven more, it seems, by fear and a kind of lemming-mindedness than by any coherently argued and substantiated case for centralised accreditation (Wasdell, 1992; Mowbray, 1995). For turkeys very rarely vote for an early Christmas; and people in positions of power rarely if ever volunteer to legislate themselves out of existence - no matter how compelling the arguments against their existence might be.

What is sometimes neglected is that it is surely the dynamics of authority and power - and their shadow, powerlessness and victimhood - which lie at the heart of this whole debate (Wasdell, 1992). We all of us most surely have deep personal issues around power, powerlessness, abusive authority, the struggle to individuate in relation to the powerful (m)other, and so on (Hall 1993); and it seems blindingly clear to this 'reluctant adult' (but still working on it!) that as a species, we have hardly begun to understand in anything like a thorough-going integrated way just how the deep dynamics of power and powerlessness impact upon the human psyche (both in interpersonal and group contexts), and in turn feed through into our political behaviour, structures - and posturings. Maguire, for example, has recently written that 'if we are to understand how maternal and paternal power interact in the psyche we must first integrate the parental couple in the theoretical mind. We still do not have a mainstream psychoanalytic theory that brings the two sexes together...' (1995, p. 226-7). And it therefore comes as little suprise when the Tudors (1994, p. 385) write that 'not much has been written either on definitions of power or on the positive use of power... in psychotherapy'.

In object relations terms, we (individually and collectively) unconsciously replicate in the outer (political) world the narcissistically wounded and abused realities of our deeply personal inner worlds; and it is surely at the very least highly premature, and at worst a supremely unaware arrogance, to believe that as a species we are as yet anywhere near possessing the capacity to create healthy, benevolent political structures that are comparatively free of the unworked-through and barely understood dynamics of power and powerlessness. And it is surely a supreme irony that it is counsellors and psychotherapists, whom we could presumably expect to have a far greater capacity for self-reflection upon their behaviour than most, who are being swept along with the tide of hierarchical professionalisation in a largely uncritical and unproblematised way - and which, incidentally, must cast some doubt on the capacity for such practitioners to work successfully with clients around issues concerning the interpersonal dynamics of authority and power.

The Independent Practitioners' Network (formerly the Independent Therapists' Network) is a network of practitioners attempting to face up to the full (and invariably painful) realities of power and powerlessness, in its attempt to devise a viable process of self and peer accreditation and validation that both recognises and transcends the often infantilising dynamics around power with which we all struggle. Steiner's apt statement on power could easily serve as a leitmotiv for the IPN: he writes, 'the greatest antidote to the authoritarian use of power... is for people to develop individual power in its multidimensional forms and to dedicate themselves to passing on power to as many others as can be found in a lifetime' (quoted in Embleton Tudor and Tudor, 1994, p. 400). Whether or not the IPN initiative is ultimately successful, there is no doubt in my mind that those of us who are involved in it are at least barking up the right tree! - which is much more than can be said for the bureaucratic professionalising mentality represented by UKCP, BAC et al., who seem to want to believe that it is somehow possible to 'registrate' away by definitional fiat the fundamentally emotional difficulties with which we all struggle around personal power, self-worth and so on, and thereby short-circuit the deep and difficult emotional work that is a necessary precondition for a healthy 'way of being' with power (both personal AND political) to emerge and subsist.

As Richard Mowbray and Juliana Brown have most poignantly written, 'Where there is a genuine need for structures, we should develop structures that foster our values rather then betray them' (Mowbray 1995, p. 225); and there is surely a great deal of emotional work that needs to be done - not to mention a much fuller articulation of how the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, interface and co-create each other - before we can begin to develop such healthy structures. One thing seems clear: the conventional professionalising route being adopted by the nascent training bureaucracies cannot but replicate, feed and reinforce the very unhealthy and dysfunctional power dynamics which it should be the work of those in our field to work through and transcend. And whether we have individually and collectively attained the maturity necessary for an open, honest and relatively undefended engagement with these deepest of personal and political issues remains very much an open question.

References:
Embleton Tudor, Louise & Tudor, Keith. The Personal and the Political: Power, Authority and Influence in Psychotherapy. In P. Clarkson and M. Pokorny (eds) The Handbook of Psychotherapy: Routledge, 1994

Hall, Jill. The Reluctant Adult: An Exploration of Choice: Prism Press, 1993

Maguire, Marie. Men, Women, Passion and Power: Gender Issues in Psychotherapy: Routledge, 1995

Mowbray, Richard. The Case Against Psychotherapy Registration: A Conservation Issue for the Human Potential Movement: Trans Marginal Press, 1995

Wasdell, David. In the Shadow of Accreditation. Self and Society, Vol 20, No 1, 1992

Note: Information about the Independent Practitioners' Network can be obtained from: IPN, 326 Burley Road, Leeds LS4 2NZ

Richard House
Norwich, 8/11/95