ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some concrete examples of how power is arguably being abused through profession-centred therapy's "regime of truth". Therapists commonly assume that their elegant theoretical formulations about "development", human distress, therapeutic change, and the like, along with their painstakingly encoded "professional" procedures, together constitute the crucial factors that define and deliver effective therapy. A further effect of institutionalized professionalization is the rigidification and rendering legitimate of what some might call the precious, often mystifying language and procedures of the therapy world-view. The professionally driven modernist world-view, by contrast, has recently been making a strong bid for hegemony in the "establishment" world of therapy—well illustrated, by the burgeoning preoccupation with so-called "scientific" audit, evaluation, and research. Some of the more radical counter-cultural strands of therapy have in times begun to embrace the so-called discursive, social constructionist, and deconstructionist approaches to both the theory and practice of therapy.
