The Spirit of Motivational Interviewing as an Apparatus of Governmentality. An Analysis of Reading Materials Used in the Training of Substance Abuse Clinicians

Abstract

Substance abuse clinicians working at the coal face with clients daily are confronted with client problems that are robust and tangible. The understanding of these problems is granted epistemological and ontological legitimacy by the psy-sciences. As a result, practice in the substance abuse treatment and addiction fields are rarely subject to the scrutiny provided by post-structural analysis. Moreover, the disciplines of addiction treatment and sociology rarely collaborate in any meaningful way for numerous reasons. For the AoD clinician caught betwixt and between biological psychological and sociological discourses, there has been a tendency to opt for the perceived problem solving capabilities of psychological discourses. However, in a post-aetiological hemisphere, attention is increasingly fixated on the fiscal imperative. Clinician/Client relationships have been reconfigured in neo-liberal society. In this study, materials used to train undergraduate students Motivational Interviewing skills in an Alcohol and Drug degree programme were subject to a textual analysis deploying the Foucaultian concept of governmentality. The familiar aetiological descriptor model used in the field was transposed into the Foucaultian term discourse. One article subject to analysis is presented here. The intention was to interrogate the effects of Motivational Interviewing on client and clinician and the resultant repositioning. It was found that Motivational Interviewing technologies reposition the client as an active self-governing autonomous subject while the clinician is professionally and spiritually imprecated in the manufacture of a neo liberal subjectivity within the client. It is argued that the client/clinician interaction constituted, owes less to clinical considerations than to contemporary neo liberal agendas. Proponents of the practice cite progressive and enlightened facets of Motivational Interviewing through an uncritical indebtedness to ascendant resilience and strength based discourses. Alternatively it can be understood as an individualising strategy that displaces clients from former robust communities of understanding, latterly positioned as primitive or deficit ridden. In the resulting motif cli-T. Carton 193 ent/clinician interaction is reconfigured so that the active rational, self-empowered client is produced by the newly embourgoised clinician. Clinical concerns are casually jettisoned. Thus Motivational Interviewing is at once a political/apolitical apparatus, which requires further interrogation.

A Welcome Antidote to the Evangelism of Compulsory Optimism and Resilience

“…However, there is an asymmetry wherein older discourses are marginalised through the use of caricature and new ones constructed with an aura of innovation and progress. Teaching and learning materials are thus constructed on this basis (Carton, 2014).…”

The Discursive Construction of Risk: Social Work Knowledge Production and Criminalized Women

“…Government also includes various institutions of socialization: school, medicine, the family, and the helping professions, such as social work. In this way, viewed from the conceptual lens of governmentality, neoliberalism's decree for less government does not equate to less governance but rather to shifting forms of governance (Rose 2000;Carton 2014).…”

“Getting Better”

“…Work analyzing overall treatment philosophies or the implications of treatment approaches is less common but nevertheless constitutes a significant body of research that sheds light on the operations of particular programs, their effects, and questions that could be asked about their aims and outcomes. This work explores particular programs or particular approaches in particular sites, or national settings, providing important insights into practices that might otherwise elude critical scrutiny because they cater to people who are oftentimes extremely marginalized (see, e.g., Bennett, 2011 [methadone treatment]; Bourgois, 2000 [methadone treatment]; Carton, 2014 [motivational interviewing]; Ekendahl, 2009 [compulsory treatment]; Fraser & valentine, 2008 [methadone treatment]; Gowan & Whetstone, 2012 [rehabilitation]; Travis, 2009 [recovery movement]). Less common again is literature on expert perspectives on treatment across more than one national setting or across a range of treatments or kinds of expertise.…”