Subject Positioning: Gaps and Stability in the Therapeutic Encounter

Abstract

The concept of subject positions holds that people make sense of who they are by locating themselves within culturally circulating discourses and narratives. Researchers have noted its therapeutic relevance, seeing it as a precise theoretical and methodological means for identifying shifts in self-construction during the course of therapy. However, implicit and explicit debates continue in positioning theory, and there are two such contested areas I will focus on here. First, can a person (e.g., a therapy client) experience him- or herself outside of discursive positioning? And second, how do we balance out our interest in both the dynamic, situational responsivity of subject positioning (i.e., its fluidity) and the expectation that identity should contain some element of sameness over time (i.e., its constancy)? After all, therapeutically emergent and preferred identities require some degree of transsituational stability: Self-sameness over time is sometimes as important as self-fluidity. This article explores these issues through an analysis of a psychotherapy case conducted by the existential psychotherapist James Bugental. It is argued that clients can indeed find themselves temporarily outside of discursive positioning, and that new positions can be lent some degree of transsituational stability by linking them to personal and historical experiences.