ABSTRACT
Psychotherapy is very good at solving puzzles over and exposing the reasons for the problems people experience and the pain they feel: if there were a fuel tank within full of 'will power', psychotherapy would certainly enable them to tap it. For people struggling to get to grips with the deprivations their anxieties impose upon their lives, nothing is to be gained by moral self-reproach or searching their interiors for the springs of 'will power'. Muscle power may, rather similarly, give some men an option for violent influence where no other form is available to them. Brain power undoubtedly offers possibilities of more far-reaching influence. With the possible exception of violent coercion, as through the use of military power, the quickest and most immediately effective way of influencing people is through controlling the means of their livelihood. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has documented the importance of various kinds of 'cultural capital' to the establishment and preservation of social power.
