Jeremy W. C. et al, What great questions you pose, Jeremy .You certainly got me thinking and halted my lurking. The institution of confession within the Roman Catholic Church whether in the Thomistic Middle Ages or in the 20th century does not appear to me to be constructed in the manner in which you describe it. I find your description somewhat romantic. To penitents then or now, I think, the exercise of power is evident and, in fact, takes precedence over self examination or reflection. Then or now the penitent recites prescribed sins the discursive construction of authors (authority) invested in the exercise of power by disciplining and punishing. This is not an exercise in discovery. Far from separating the body from the soul or spirit, confession writes its result on the bodies of penitents more painfully perhaps in the Middle Ages, but still in humiliating and degrading forms today. Feelings of relief( a bodily response), I think, come for penitents from having successfully negotiated an interaction of power; by being submissive the penitent receives a reward, a blessing. The commonplace notion that confession is good for the soul is, to my way of thinking, light years away from the institution of confession. Closer to that notion might be Augustine¹s "Confessions" or certain modalities of self exploration as they are constructed in modern and postmodern psychoanalytic discourses. The idea that self exploration can be articulated in some form gets closer, I believe, to your concept of confession. What we can never shed, after Foucault, is that any discourse one selects will embody power relations. Perhaps self is constructed in resistance. (In a non-discursive fashion Touraine and Castells propose that concept) But I digress. I think that your exploration is very important for us and hope you continue to be creative in pursuing it. Ann De Vaney Ann De Vaney Department of Education 2001 Berkeley Place University of California,Irvine Irvine, CA 92697 Phone (949) 824-6097 Fax (949) 824-2965 adevaney@uci.edu