Premium
Power and the origins of unhappiness: Working with individuals
Author(s) -
Smail David
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
journal of community and applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.042
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1099-1298
pISSN - 1052-9284
DOI - 10.1002/casp.2450050506
Subject(s) - power (physics) , psychology , social psychology , empowerment , distress , process (computing) , lift (data mining) , epistemology , sociology , psychotherapist , computer science , political science , law , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , data mining , operating system
Evidence that the ‘ultimate repressed’ in our understanding of emotional distress is power can be gleaned even from Freud's writing. This is a form of repression which community psychology is well placed to lift. Impossible though it is to stand outside the ‘apparatus of power’ (and, therefore to give a complete analysis of it), we cannot achieve an accurate account of the causes of human unhappiness without taking its operations into account as fully as possible. The psychological therapies do have an implicit notion of will power, but this serves only to distract our attention from the external, material nature of power. We have to be careful, moreover, not to ‘psychologize’ power by trying to turn it into an internal attribute to be ‘switched on’ by an essentially mysterious process of ‘empowerment’. We need to specify empirically the types of power that contribute to ‘clinical’ distress and give an account of ‘therapy’ in terms of the powers to which it has access (recognizing also that these are limited).