Power, Therapy, and the Electrified Matrix: Rethinking Dependency in the Clinical Encounter

Following some research for my group analytic training, I have found myself thinking differently about online therapy and about the current preoccupation with power in psychotherapy more broadly. I am beginning to wonder whether some of what gets framed as “power dynamics in the therapeutic relationship” may actually reflect a wider cultural tension about our dependence on technological and institutional systems.

Online work makes this unusually visible. The therapeutic relationship no longer unfolds in a quiet room between two people. It emerges inside a vast infrastructure of platforms, data policies, safeguarding software, clinical records, broadband, power grids, and corporate governance. The therapist and client meet inside a system long before they meet each other.

This raises a question: is some of the anxiety we attribute to interpersonal power actually about the vulnerability of being held by systems rather than by another human?

The Rise of Power Discourse in Psychotherapy

Over the last two decades, psychotherapy has become increasingly attentive to power. We see this in reflective practice groups, training programmes, regulatory frameworks, safeguarding cultures and theory shaped by critical, post‑colonial and intersectional perspectives. The prevailing focus is that therapists hold institutional and psychological power, while clients are inherently vulnerable, and that ethical practice requires transparency, humility and redistribution.

None of this is to be dismissed. Yet in group life, the symbolic and the literal flow together, and group analytic thinking invites a broader frame that attends to both.

What if the hyper‑focus on interpersonal power is not only a moral development but also a cultural symptom of a deeper shift in how dependency and security are organised in modern societies?

If, as Foulkes argued, the individual relates not simply to another person but to the wider social matrix instantiated in the therapeutic encounter, then the matrix itself must be examined.

Industrial Dependence and the New Containment

For most of human history, dependency was local and embodied. Care was mediated through kin, land, parish, guild and community. The forces one relied upon could be named, confronted or negotiated with. Today, dependency is infrastructural.

Servers, electrical grids, broadband networks, cloud storage, automated triage pathways and algorithmic decision‑making shape access to care. Containment has become industrial rather than communal. The pandemic exposed this starkly: when the system falters, our knowledge of how to meet basic needs is profoundly limited. If the infrastructures that sustain us were to disappear, most of us would be only days away from crisis.

Likewise in professional life what historically resided in the therapeutic relationship now resides partly in the system around it. This redefines what power feels like in the room.

Online therapy makes this explicit. The client relates not only to the clinician but to the platform, the latency, the camera, the GDPR policies, the risk‑escalation protocols and the knowledge that records are stored beyond human memory. The holding environment includes routers, servers and corporate data governance.

Clinical notes feed into digital systems that interface with safeguarding, law enforcement, child protection and performance management. Online sessions rely on power grids, platforms and payment gateways. Referral pathways are automated and audit trails permanent. Dependency is now no longer simply interpersonal; it is technological.

Safeguarding, Surveillance and the Technological Superego

Contemporary healthcare operates under intensifying regimes of surveillance, often justified as safety. Safeguarding is vital, yet its enactment can drift from care to pre‑emptive control.

Automatic red‑flagging, mandatory reporting thresholds, digital risk dashboards and multi‑agency sharing turn therapists into conduits for institutional power.

This shapes the client’s internal experience. Therapy is no longer speech in a private room; it is speech inside a system with the capacity to classify, notify, record and intervene. Knowing that words may enter institutional machinery generates caution, self‑censorship and defensive narratives.

Power may therefore be experienced less as “my therapist could dominate me” and more as “this system could act upon me without my consent”. And we know that surveillance is often the opposite of being seen. Psychological attunement requires presence, nuance and relational depth, whereas surveillance produces scrutiny without understanding. Those who become more visible to the system are not met with greater care but with escalating layers of monitoring. Visibility becomes exposure rather than recognition.

In group analytic terms, this shifts the location of disturbance. The anxiety that appears to arise between therapist and client is often generated elsewhere, in the wider matrix of technological, bureaucratic and institutional forces that surround the encounter. What is felt interpersonally may in fact be the downstream effect of systemic vigilance: the client senses not only the therapist’s presence but the gaze of the infrastructure behind them. Disturbance is therefore located not simply in the relationship but in the circuitry that holds it, where surveillance, policy and automated scrutiny shape the emotional climate long before either person speaks. The therapeutic dyad becomes the surface on which these deeper forces register.

When Systemic Anxiety Becomes Interpersonal Ethics

People crave faces, not firewalls. But to challenge our dependence is overwhelming, and so we store up our dis-ease, turning our atrophied manual skill set into stories of interpersonal betrayal. So the anxiety created by dependence on vast technological infrastructures may be displaced into interpersonal ethics.

We debate whether the therapist is enacting power when the deeper vulnerability originates in the systems surrounding the encounter. The interpersonal becomes a theatre for processing systemic helplessness.

This does not invalidate relational power analysis; it situates it. Often the therapist is simply the nearest visible person onto whom infrastructural power is projected.

High‑visibility groups often become the carriers of this disturbance. When dependency is organised through vast, opaque systems, the anxiety it generates has nowhere human to land. It is therefore displaced onto those who are most visible within the matrix: The more a person relies on institutional structures for safety, care or recognition, the more exposed they become to the system’s gaze. At the same time, those who provide support at the visible edges of the system (clinicians, educators, frontline staff) become the human surfaces onto which collective dependency and frustration are projected. The dependent are scrutinised; the visible are blamed. Both positions carry the emotional weight of a system that cannot be confronted directly, leaving individuals to absorb anxieties that properly belong to the wider matrix.

Ideology as Infrastructure: A Contemporary Example

Group analysis situates the individual within the social field. It resists fantasies of the isolated dyad. Instead of asking only “Who holds power between us?” we might ask:

“What forces shape how we experience what is happening between us?”

This moves us from interpersonal ethics to systemic ontology.

It invites curiosity over compliance, relational humility over ideological certainty and collective thinking over binary moral judgment.

Here, gender identity offers a particularly vivid illustration of ideology functioning as infrastructure. The contemporary expectation that systems should affirm and operationalise subjective identity claims (from clinical records to pronoun protocols, from speech norms to surgical pathways) reveals a deeper cultural wish for technology and bureaucracy to authorise what biology cannot. In this sense, to affirm a new gender is also to affirm our dependence on the system’s capacity to remake, record and legitimate the self. The authority shifts from the body as a primary home to the infrastructure that can modify, document or enforce a new category. What appears as a personal or interpersonal conflict is therefore also a negotiation with the technological and institutional machinery we rely upon to stabilise identity.

This raises a broader question about where “home” is located in contemporary life. Historically, home was anchored in the body, kinship, land and community. Today, home is increasingly mediated through systems: legal status, digital identity, administrative categories and institutional recognition. When belonging depends on system alignment, identity becomes something granted or withheld by infrastructures rather than held in the body or affirmed in community. This helps explain why these debates feel so charged. They touch not only on gender, but on the deeper anxiety of where we are allowed to belong, and who has the authority to confer that belonging.

Conclusion: Therapy as Circuit, Not Sanctuary

The therapeutic encounter no longer sits outside industrial life. It is shaped by encryption, electricity, safeguarding software, legal frameworks, audit culture, digital platforms and institutional policy. These forces form part of the holding environment, whether or not we acknowledge them.

Power, therefore, is not merely interpersonal. It is diffuse, systemic and infrastructural. Working ethically with power requires attention to both the relationship we can see and the systems that quietly structure it.

The clinic is not simply a room. It is a point of contact within a wider network in which human vulnerability meets technological and institutional force. Recognising this does not diminish the therapeutic relationship; it situates it.

Attending to these conditions may be one of the profession’s next developmental tasks.