Self-denial or self-mastery? : Foucault's genealogy of the confessional self/ created by A. C. (Tina) Besley

When people come to counselling they do so because they identify some issue or problem in their life with which they want help. In the process they reveal, to a greater or lesser extent, various aspects of themselves in a form of confession of the self. Thus, the counselling relationship, although a private one, has performative aspects, whereby the person reveals something of their truth about themselves to the counsellor. How the person and the counsellor then deal with this discursive construction of self will differ according to the modality that the counsellor adopts. This paper is divided into sections that cover, first, an introduction with a brief outline of Foucault's genealogical analysis, and second, a genealogy of confessing our selves with subsections on Classical Greek technologies of the self, Christian religious confessional practices, and medico-therapeutic confessional practices: the secularisation of confession. The paper ends with a third section that asks the question, counselling as self-denial or self-mastery? This paper argues that confession is a form of truth telling that constitutes the self. Following Foucault, it suggests that confession, as a technology of self, should be based less on an ethic of self-denial than one of self-mastery. Self-mastery provides a secular model consonant with the demands of a postmodern world that recognises the inescapability of desire and the necessity of pleasure in a new body politics.