Expert Relations

This quote is taken from an interview I conducted with Jade Simon, a well-known author of self-help books. Jade’s view that clients are challenging therapeutic authority confirms one side of the debate on the status of expertise as exemplified by Giddens’ argument (1991, 1992) that all forms of expertise in contemporary society are being subject to scepticism and disputation, as referred to in Chapter 3. The other side of the debate, exemplified by Rose (1989, 1996a), suggests that therapeutic expertise is insulated from much of this critique, and is in fact gaining credence across many social spheres because of its claims to truth and to be doing ‘good’. So how representative is Jade’s observation amongst the personal development practitioners interviewed? The aim of this chapter is to take up this question in order to address the meaning of therapeutic expertise in personal development. It will examine how issues of power between practitioner and client inflect notions of expertise because power relations between practitioners and clients is one of the main ways in which practitioners spoke about how they understood the work of personal development. Given my emphasis on the particularities of personal development practices, and the specific context in which the practitioners interviewed work, this chapter will also analyse how these shape their conceptualisationsof practitioner/client relations in ways relatively unexplored in the literature on the sociology of therapeutic cultures.