Why Postmodern Theory may be a Problematic Basis for Therapeutic Practice: A Feminist Perspective

Both poststructural and social constructionist thinking are imbued with a masculine bias. First, I demonstrate that Foucault's theory of power and knowledge fails to take into account the female experience of power and the gendered nature of knowledge production. With the support of psychoanalytic theory I also claim that Foucault's theory of the ‘social’, ‘discursive’ production of ‘selves’ omits the contribution of the prelinguistic but no less ‘social’ mother–infant relationship, and in so doing obscures the prelinguistic foundations of emotionality. This poststructural reduction of ‘selves’ to, and subsequent subsuming of emotionality within, the instance of ‘language’, ‘discourse’ or ‘narrative’, is, I claim, replicated in the social constructionist thinking of Gergen and Bruner. Finally, I consider some of the consequences of a therapeutic practice which has its foundations in these two interrelated bodies of thought, suggesting, from a feminist perspective, that a major shortcoming of this narrative practice is its failure to attend to emotionality.