Content area
Full text
The philosophical groundwork of Gilles Deleuze is examined for its relevance for narrative practice in therapy and conflict resolution. Deleuze builds particularly on Foucault's analytics of power as "actions upon actions" and represents power relations diagrammatically in terms of lines of power. He also conceptualizes lines of flight through which people become other. These concepts are explored in relation to a conversation with a couple about a crisis in their relationship. Tracing lines of power and lines of flight are promoted as fresh descriptions of professional practice that fit well with the goals of narrative practice.
Keywords: Narrative Therapy; Conflict Resolution; Deleuze; Lines of Flight; Power Relations; Foucault; Michael White
Fam Proc 48:332-346, 2009
Therapeutic practice has to continually reinvent itself, and redescribe itself, in order to stay relevant and vital. The need for this constant reinvention is that the conditions of life in which counselors, therapists, and their clients have to live are continually changing and the discourses that govern these conditions of life are never constant. In order to stay relevant therapy needs to continue to seek out the most sophisticated analyses of what is happening in the world in which we live and work. In this paper, I propose to pursue this aim through an inquiry into the relevance and application to narrative practice of the thinking of the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995).
In the aftermath of the intellectual ferment that took place in Paris in 1968, a rich vein of philosophical writing emerged. It has developed into what has become known as poststructuralism and has given rise to theoretical innovation across a variety of domains of academic and professional discourse. Michael White and David Epston in 1990 were the first to introduce the thinking of Michel Foucault into the world of family therapy and Foucault's analytics of power has, since then, been a central feature of narrative therapy. Michael White has since drawn explicitly on other poststructuralist philosophers as well. Take, for example, his (1992) use of Jacques Derrida' s concept of "deconstruction" in the process of conceptualizing the problems that people present to therapists. Gilles Deleuze, a friend of Foucault's, was another poststructuralist philosopher whose work offers further opportunity to apply poststructuralist thought to the therapy field.
I...