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Reviews : Tullio Maranhão, Therapeutic Discourse and Socratic Dialogue: a cultural critique, London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, $22.50, xv + 276 pp

How can a close scrutiny of Socratic dialogue bear upon the controversy about the nature of therapeutic discourse waged within the professional community of therapists? Therapeutic discourse is a ’cultural subsystem’ (26) akin to philosophy, religion, science and politics. It affects our outlook on life and the world by and large and provides us with ’principles for action’. As an attempt to integrate, in discourse, ’theory and practice’ (xii), it embodies a recurring theme of ’the Western cultural tradition’. In ancient Greek culture and society, Socratic dialogue was a significant endeavour to preserve, in discourse, the unity of ’representation and action’ (xiv) throughout historical change; in our society, the transformation of therapeutic discourse, in the spirit of either modernist ’conservatism’ or postmodernist ’revisionism’ (xii), faces very much the same problems. For, in its quest for unity, therapeutic discourse meets an ’epistemological puzzle’ (xiv), bestowed by Socrates’ philosophy, which originated ’one of the essential tensions of the Western cultural heritage’ (230), the tearing dilemma between ’fragmentation’ and ’integration’ of a ’trinity’ constituted by ’knowledge, power, and rhetoric’ (236). As it happens, ’the struggle to integrate knowledge, power, and rhetoric into a unity is as frustrating as the struggle to delete one or two members of this trinity and arrive at a consistent wholeness’