1. The Depathologization of Everyday Life: Implications for Philosophical Counseling.
- Author
-
MEHURON, KATE
- Subjects
- *
BIOPOLITICS (Philosophy) , *NORMATIVITY (Ethics) , *NORMALIZATION (Sociology) , *PHILOSOPHICAL counseling , *FEMINISM - Abstract
Philosophical counseling offers a depathologizing practice that can benefit both the practitioner and the client. Philosophical practitioners ought to give up claims to value neutrality of their practices and instead, acknowledge that the interventions of philosophical counseling in clinical diagnostic discourses are normative, theory-laden, and politically significant. Michel Foucault's account of biopower is a useful analytic of the psychopathologization of everyday life, and can show the significance of depathologizing gestures by philosophical counseling practice. The conflation, by some philosophical practitioners, of the medical disease model and all psychotherapeutic methods is critiqued. Foucaults conflation of human normativity and normalization is shown to imply a social determinism that is self-defeating for depathologizing practices. Historian of science Georges Canguilhem's alternative account of human normativity within the medical disease model is offered as an antidote to the conflations by these philosophical practitioners and Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2015