Tracing therapeutic discourse in material culture.

Approaches to language and subjectivity from post-structuralist theory outside psychology and from deconstructive perspectives within counselling and psychotherapy have questioned the way therapeutic relationships are formed in Western culture. Discourse analysis has been developed as a methodological framework to take this questioning further, and to provide detailed readings of therapeutic patterns of meaning. Foucauldian discourse analytic approaches help us to address how we are made into selves that speak, how we experience the self therapeutically. I will elaborate this methodological framework through an analysis of a piece of text--an item of consumer packaging--tracing the contours of therapeutic discourse through a series of 20 methodological steps. Therapeutic discourse draws the reader in as the kind of subject who must feel a relationship at some depth with the (imagined) authors for the text to work. This paper thus illustrates the value of discourse analytic readings of texts, and helps us to reflect upon our commitment to discourses of counselling and psychotherapy as empowering stories and as culturally-specific patterns of subjectivity.