A further uncomfortable aspect of this paradox is that the role of qualified, trained professional usually implies that a skill is being offered which does not place the onus for its effectiveness on the client. Reasonably enough, in consulting a therapist or counsellor, clients expect to be cured, not to find that cure is a matter of their own responsibilty. Psychotherapy must surely be the only profession to posit fundamental principles such as client 'resistance' to account for its inability to deliver the goods.
To understand why therapists and counsellors have been locked in this contradiction for so long one need look no further than their interests. Quite obviously, they are unable to claim that their influence can reach in any significant way beyond the consulting room, and if they are to justify taking fees for their activities, it simply must be the case that clients harbour within them the possibility of change. Therapy creates the crucible in which it is forced thereafter to work its magic, and any theoretical consideration of responsibility is inexorably limited to the (supposed) moral resources of the client.
But the paradox of responsibility is escaped easily enough, I believe, if one extends the analysis beyond the walls of the consulting room. For responsibility is inextricably bound up with power, and power is accorded from without, not from within.
People cannot 'pull themselves together' not out of any wilful reluctance to do so but because the power to do so is not available to them. Exactly the same applies to 'responsibility. I can only be held responsible for what I have the power to do, and if I do indeed have the power to choose, only then can I reasonably be said to be responsible for my choices. No responsibility without power; no power without responsibility. And we are not talking here about 'will-power': the exercise of reponsibility in no way depends on the application of any such mysterious internal faculty (see above, 'The Experience of Self') but rather on the availablity of external powers and resources.
Our 'self-as-centre' culture makes it very difficult for us to conceive of responsibility as anything other than the application of personal influence which has its origin entirely within the individual agent. It takes quite an effort of imagination to see the person - as I suggest we should - as a point in social space-time through which powers flow. Though, as an individual, I am indeed that point through which whatever powers and resources available to me may be, so to speak, refracted back into the social world, I certainly did not personally create them out of nothing.
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