We read with interest, the commentary written by David Smail pertaining to the articles published in the special power, control and health issue of the Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. We support his central concern that researchers and practitioners should direct attention to the role of structural forces (such as power) in the generation of distress. This direction is challenging, given the predilection of contemporary culture and institutional structures to favour, as Smail points out `individualistic, often moralistic accounts of personal dif®culty and distress' (p. 160). Nonetheless, we fear that in his efforts to avoid concepts and language that might lead to an individualistic blame-the-victim stance, he might have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in at least one case.
We refer to his conceptualization of power and infer from his discussion that he conceives of it in material terms, particularly access to resources. Thus he notes Nor, in my view, do more obviously material power-giving resources present any problems for an essentially psychological theory' (p. 164), and in the last two sentences of his paper he states What we need, rather is a psychological language that places individual experience coherently and exclusively in the essentially material environment of social space-time. In this environment, power is the fundamental explanatory construct' (p. 165). Furthermore, in his speci®c comments regarding our paper (Brooker and Eakin) he appears to object to our proposed links between symbolic power and distress. He notes that: `the distinction between direct'' and symbolic'' pathways, ``stressors'' and ``meaning'', nevertheless does preserve a kind of independence from the material which is bound to invite intervention at the psychological (symbolic, consciousness-mediated) level only such that we land back with cognitive behaviour therapy and notions such as self-ef®cacy' (p. 162).
Symbolic and psychological are not synonymous. We use symbolic in a sociological sense, referring to the shared meaning of events and objects within a social context. The meanings that people attribute to things are socially produced and by de®nition, do not refer to individual perceptions. We suggest that a repudiation of the notion of symbolic power and its in¯uence on distress is problematic for both political and theoretical reasons.
For instance, in the workplace arena, most observers now de®ne sexual harassment such that symbolic hazards are granted recognition. According to de®nitions from the American Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the creation of a hostile work environment, say by the presence of pornographic posters in the workplace or the physical assault of the clay model of a woman, could be considered to be sexual harassment. In both of these cases, the violence to women is via symbolic rather than material pathways. To deny links between symbolic power and distress is to undermine these signi®cant political developments.
Theoretically, a repudiation of symbolic power contradicts Smail's own position. Smail suggests that we need to develop a language that divests itself of its current individualistic and victim-blaming biases. Yet, language is itself a symbolic system. To argue that language has potential political rami®cations is to acknowledge its symbolic power.