Discourse, disciplinary power and ethical subjectivity: Responses to session limits in student counselling

Abstract

Session limits are widespread in student counselling. The rationale is the need to allocate scarce resources in response to demand. A research study in an Irish university explored how the setting of standardised session limits was discursively constructed by a group of students and counsellors. It sought to privilege the voices of student clients and counsellors in order to explore the effects and consequences of this practice. Foucauldian discourse analysis was used to explore the discourses of both groups of participants and how these might link to their responses to session limits, in this case, six. Discourses endure over time and draw on social and cultural understandings which should be recognisable and can be identified by close examination of language. This study highlighted the discourses of stigma, recovery and personal responsibility, patient or consumer and expert knowledge, which were reflected in the various ways participants positioned themselves. The study draws on Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and the production of ethical subjectivity to illustrate the dilemmas participants faced in their struggle to respond to session limits. In keeping with a Foucauldian approach, which suggests that the discourses upon which a phenomenon is constructed become more visible at its margins, the student client group had all received more than the standard six sessions. Although counsellors have the formal power to allocate the scarce resource of counselling sessions, the operation of this in practice is nuanced and full of ethical complexity. Disciplinary power is a particular type of power which subjects exercise over their own person, such as the application of rules of conduct and appropriate behaviour. The operation of disciplinary power, ethical subjectivity and discourses are inter-related, impinge on each other in various ways and are often in a state of flux and change.