Abstract
<jats:p>The article outlines a theoretical and methodological framework for the critical analysis of therapy in sociological optics, serving as a foundation for the development of a comprehensive future research framework. Drawing on the works of M. Foucault, G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, G. Agamben, L. Boltanski, and È. Chiapello, the author proposes the sociological conceptualisation of therapy that goes beyond its conventional understanding as an instrument of psychological support. Instead, psychotherapy is approached as a discourse and an agent of power that reproduces specific forms of subjectivity as well as fabrication of senses and meanings. Through a Foucauldian lens, psychotherapy is conceptualised as both a therapeutic discourse and a locus of power in which meaning is constructed. The article emphasises the importance of analysing psychotherapy as a discursive phenomenon, which enables to trace the production of specific regimes of knowledge – particularly how psychotherapeutic discourse structures the understandings of normality and pathology, establishes new modes of interpreting emotional experience, and serves as a space for the realization of mechanisms of power. The paper examines the dual nature of power within the psychotherapeutic discourse as that which constructs social space and is simultaneously constructed by it, operating through the subject – homo oeconomicus – who transforms elements of subjectivity and personal life into economic value. Psychotherapy is demonstrated to encourage the subject to observe, analyse, and regulate themselves, converting emotions, experiences, and suffering into resources for productivity and market efficiency. Particular attention is paid to the dual nature of psychotherapy: it functions both as a technique of the self and a component of the security apparatus that reproduces neoliberal logic within the subject. Thanks to this conceptualisation of psychotherapy, new forms of power become visible – forms that contemporary society often orthodoxly represents as individual freedom or techniques of happiness rather than as explicit modes of exploitation. The approach proposed in this article enables a renewed understanding of the relationship between psychotherapeutic practices and power relations, opening perspectives for further empirical and theoretical research in this field.</jats:p>