ABSTRACT
This chapter connects the forms of ‘deconstruction’ we were working with inside psychology to a movement in psychotherapy that was also borrowing from the same kinds of ideas. The ideas had been developed as a ‘narrative turn’ inside systemic family therapy, and practitioners there had been able to develop a new practice in work that addressed the link between individual distress and social context. That work showed that deconstruction in psychology is not simply a new ‘language game’, and that there were powerful therapeutic consequences of taking Derrida's work seriously.
This chapter thus aims to take the ‘narrative turn’ in psychotherapy a step forward, and also include reflection on the role of psychotherapy in contemporary culture, drawing on the writings of Derrida and Foucault, and the development of critiques of language in psychotherapy that attend to the interweaving of meaning and power, and which together unravel attempts to reveal hidden personal truth. These critical perspectives also show how it is possible to find a place for reflection, resistance and agency to create a transformative therapeutic practice. These tasks are intertwined, and we find aspects of each of them teased through in different ways from different vantage points in this line of psy-chotherapeutic work.
The deconstructive approach in psychotherapy ranges across the various ways in which deconstruction can be used in psychotherapy as part of the process of exploring problems and ‘re-constructing’ how they function in the stories people tell, in which deconstruction can be used as psychotherapy in the 57reworking of the relationship between therapist and client to address issues of power, and in which deconstruction can be developed from psychotherapy to reflect critically upon the role of this modern enterprise of ‘helping’ and expertise applied to the distress in people's lives.
