The professional is political: an interpretation of the problem of the past in solution-focused therapy

This paper proposes that therapists subject their work to radical doubt designed to uncover and interpret the micro-politics that in here in professional knowledge and practice. Using Orlie's notion of trespass, the approach to the past employed by solution-focused therapies is examined. These trespasses involve the therapy's silence about the meaning of injustice; its role in relation to social movements; and its potential to reproduce relations of domination. A new conception of ethics is proposed that takes into account the inevitable presence of the political as it fashions the history that conditions us as human beings.