Counseling Youth

Counseling Youth: Foucault, Power and the Ethics of Subjectivity Tina Besley University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Using the work of Foucault, this study examines changing notions of the self and identity and how psychological and sociological discourses have conceptualized and constituted adolescence/youth as the primary client in school counseling. Case studies of mental hygiene films in the United States and a moral panic in New Zealand are used to examine how youth were morally constituted in the postwar period--a time when guidance counseling emerged in Western countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. The author uses Foucault's notion of governmentality to critically examine how counseling professionalized itself as a disciplinary body. This book is targeted at practicing counselors, counseling students and counselor theoreticians. It will also find audiences with graduate students in youth studies and those interested in the work and applications of Michel Foucault. The Foucauldian critique has unsettled almost all of our certainties. In Counseling Youth, Besley gently shepherds us through her extrapolation to some of the more obvious sites for such an analysis- schooling and the subjects of that, youth. She also wisely indicates how narrative therapy takes up such a critique of the assumed neutrality of education and school counseling- institutions that often seem unaware of their power-knowledge relationships. DAVID EPSTON, co-author of Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends(1990) and Biting The Hand That Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia(2004). One of the best things that I can say about this book is that it had a personal impact. It nudged me into re-thinking various aspects of my work. It is a book that achieves a rare thing. It talks about counseling young people without getting so caught up in the detail of practice that it loses sight of the big picture .I believe that school counselors who engage with this work will find that their practice is never quite the same again. They will be invited to think about things they have previously taken for granted and to listen to young people in new ways. JOHN WINSLADE, Coordinator of Counselor Education, California State University San Bernardino. Co-Author of Narrative Counseling in Schools: Powerful & Brief.