Politics and Power

Politics, Power and Pathology

In effect clinical practice is relatively straightforward if it is not ‘political’ and it is true that many different modalities will achieve a similar end with more or less the same effectiveness simply because they all carry some reasonable and recursive ‘spatial’ and ‘temporal’ characteristics and are at heart ‘developmental’.   

Paralysis in clinical practice is almost always ‘political’ and that ‘political’ is almost always a ‘power struggle’ over ‘responsibility’ and ‘authority’, at its most micro-level being within the family. More commonly the ‘power struggle’ is between various competing systems including the family.  

In such situations a case conference rarely addresses the implicit ‘power struggle’ and more ordinarily the case conference exacerbates that ‘power struggle’ by avoiding the truth leaving the patient or client vulnerable and victim to it. 

It is arguable that ‘conflict avoidance’ is an endemic feature of practitioners in this field. Small wonder that ‘conflict avoidance’ was invented by family therapy. 

If I am correct then the relationship between such endemic professionalized ‘conflict avoidance’ and the ‘power struggle’ endemic to all complex matters is fundamentally complementary and aesthetically perfect. Each complements the other, completing the other, taking the number sequence beyond zero into the negative to produce zero. 

Perfection is its own pathology, and we know this only too well from our understanding the life form virulence of cancer. The canker is truly exquisite in its own beauty like a coral reef, so much so that this beauty will appropriate the host, suck the life out of that host and in the end kill the host, simply to serve its own living end.  

The ‘power struggle’ appropriates the literal value of any difference it encounters and amplifies such difference into the analogy that is inequality. 

Politics produces a ‘power struggle’ that strips ordinary life of it’s recursive characteristics collapsing the literal into the analogy and the analogy into the literal so that all difference is disappeared into some kind of conceptual black hole between the literal and the analogy, each of which has collapsed into the other.   

What I am referring to here is the life giving human characteristics of the literal event and the human capacity for analogy and the recursive relationship between the two.  

It is arguable that pathology is the absence of a fully recursive relationship between the literal and the analogy and the absence of recursion produces an inflexibility and an ossification that consumes the value of all life giving difference. 

When the literal becomes its analogy or when the analogy becomes literally the truth, then recursion is fundamentally compromised if not entirely appropriated and the transformative effect of recursion is then evaporated, it is lost, and the genius that is therapy sets out to rediscover the traces of such recursion and reinstate or reinstall such recursion as is lost it to it’s rightful place between the literal and the analogy once again and it is only then that life itself can proceed.  

That is therapy at its best and the therapist can obtain to a particular genius that is equally aesthetically perfect, the response to which can only be humility.  

The therapeutic endeavour is ultimately symmetrical, at its best, perfectly symmetrical, perhaps a canker in the making. 

Fairness

Fairness is probably best understood using Rawls ‘Contact Theory’ (A Theory of Justice: 1971) as a basis for understanding and explaining this concept. This is a macro-political idea that can be translated into the micro politics of the couple relationship. Rawls basically sets out the idea that the unequal relationship between people and between people and the institutions of the society is naturally occurring. Not all people are born equal, are equally endowed, or equally placed, positioned or resourced. 

In any relationship harmony between the parties requires that both parties experience the relationship as being fundamentally fair; and fairness simply means that the inequalities between the parties be managed so that neither party is unreasonably disadvantaged by their participation in this unequal relationship. 

Fairness is the subjective experience of each party about (usually but not always objective) more deeply significant matters such as domestic work and sex. 

The more unequal the relationship or any part of a relationship the more imperative that other parts of that the relationship is fair.