These four pillars can be seen as human qualities embodied by the practitioner with the people they support. When someone is solidly centred on each of them, that in itself already produces therapeutic effects: the stance speaks before the techniques do.

And their usefulness is not limited to therapy. They are precious landmarks for understanding a family, an institution, a company: anywhere someone holds a function in relation to other people.

Authority: a credibility one grants oneself

Authority, here, has nothing to do with giving orders. It is the credibility practitioners grant themselves: a form of self-validation. It comes from within, it is self-generated; nobody can transmit it from the outside, and it is won or lost through the validations one grants oneself. Two sources feed it: knowledge and experience.

Knowledge

This is all the learning a person has achieved, thanks to the opportunities that came their way and through which teaching could be received. Being exposed to knowledge is not enough: one must also be in a position to assimilate and integrate it. Learning disorders may stand in the way. So may the context of life: a child who has to help put food on the family table in the evening is not available in the same way to acquire theoretical knowledge.

This knowledge is a genuine patrimony, but one to be handled with philosophy: it depends eminently on context. What confers authority at one point in the life cycle may be worth nothing at another. I may know how to raise a young child and find myself entirely at a loss in adolescence. And if my world changes abruptly — someone who moves overnight from a working-class background to a considerable fortune, or the other way round — part of the knowledge accumulated is of no further use; in the worst case, it makes me unfit for the new context.

Experience

Experience is knowledge tested in practice. It refers to all the learning achieved through trial, error and failure: an empirical knowledge that can only be acquired in the doing. Think of Cast Away, where Tom Hanks, shipwrecked, ends up drawing a face on a ball he names Wilson: day after day, he learns from his mistakes, goes through rage and frustration, and it is that — not theoretical knowledge — which teaches him to survive. Or think of contestants on survival shows: some trained for months to light a fire at home, in the south of France, only to discover on arriving on a tropical island that humidity, available wood and exhaustion change the equation entirely.

Both sources are indispensable: knowledge alone, without practice, does not confer authority, and experience alone, without knowledge, remains somewhat blind. Hence the importance of continuing to train, to read, to stay in a state of intellectual alertness. The practitioner’s own life experience is always a powerful ally: it reinforces their authority alongside their knowledge. The same holds in institutions: a director who allows their teams to train increases their authority.

Responsibility: assuming, without confusing it with guilt

Responsibility is the capacity to assume the consequences of one’s acts: to honour one’s commitments, to stand as guarantor for oneself or for others. A parent assumes responsibility for the acts of their children; a director, for the acts of the people working with them. It is a position, and a stance of maturity.

Responsibility must never be confused with guilt. To say that someone is responsible is to recognise a quality in them, not to designate them as guilty. Whoever possesses this quality anticipates the consequences of their acts, words and behaviours on others.

In therapy, we always work at making people as responsible as possible, in keeping with each one’s capacities: this quality is directly linked to the capacity to question oneself, and therefore to act. To act, to change, one has to feel responsible. If I endlessly attribute to others the responsibility for my behaviours, my attitudes, my way of speaking or my aggressiveness, then it is impossible for me to question myself — and therefore to change anything at all.

Power: producing a gap

Power is the capacity to produce an effect, to create a gap between before and after the intervention. An influencer has power: what they say or show has an impact on people. And it can be said, without this being shocking, that a therapist must have a certain power: otherwise what they do or say would have no effect whatsoever on the people who come to consult.

This power obviously entails great responsibility, and it is rigorously framed by ethics and professional codes of conduct. The power exercised by a practitioner is always meant to improve things: it is precisely because our acts have consequences that it must be held.

Legitimacy: what the collective grants

Where authority is self-generated, legitimacy is granted by society. It refers to legal position, to status, to the place recognised by the collective and which assigns a social function. Professional legitimacy may be sanctioned by a diploma, a certificate, the recognition of a training centre or that of colleagues.

It reads just as clearly in other spheres, and the stepfamily offers the clearest illustration: a stepmother may have authority, responsibility and power without having legitimacy. Children generally play that fault line admirably, with the famous “you’re not my father”, “you’re not my mother”. A step-parent in fact draws their legitimacy from the parents’ validation. To borrow a metaphor from across the Channel: if the parents are the monarchs, the step-parent is Prime Minister. They may have a great deal of power, responsibility and authority, but it is the holders of the Crown who decide what legitimacy to grant them. Some people come to consult precisely because they are going through a crisis of legitimacy, or a crisis of authority — and the two are often linked.

When a pillar is missing

The four pillars do not hold separately: it is their combinations that make the stance. And the imbalances have very precise names.

• Responsibility without power: alienation. Someone is entrusted with a responsibility without being given the means to act on what they are asked to correct. This is frequent in the world of work, and it places the person in the position of scapegoat. Often, they even end up feeling guilty for not being well: that responsibility is handed back to them too, as they are sent off to be treated or coached, as though the difficulty belonged to them, when in fact they are suffering from a systemic situation. Simply putting words on it often has an immediate soothing effect.
• Power without responsibility: despotism. Picture a family in which the child holds the power without the responsibility: their behaviours produce the greatest effects, they are the one who decides; but since they are not held responsible and do not feel responsible for their acts, they can act without ever questioning themselves. This kind of deadlock regularly brings families to consult.
• Power without legitimacy: usurpation. Power is then exercised from a place nobody has recognised.

Hence a simple principle, very useful to keep in mind: never accept a responsibility whose associated power you do not hold.

Qualities to embody, then to transmit

These four pillars are not the preserve of the practitioner: they are part of the material transmitted to the people being supported. The whole intervention aims at allowing each of the protagonists involved the full exercise of authority, responsibility, power and legitimacy.

In a family, parents and children alike must be able to fully assume their position, each in their role and to the extent of their possibilities. In an institution, the principle holds for the director, the manager, the employee and the service user alike. And this transmission only works on one condition: that the practitioner, first of all, embodies all four.