A New Therapy for Politics?

Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429910401
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Andrew Samuels has established an international practice as a political consultant, working with senior politicians, political parties and activist groups. His lectures and workshops on the application of 'therapy thinking' to social and political issues attract wide interest. His previous books in this area, such as The Political Psyche and Politics on the Couch, have been widely appreciated. Now, in a long-anticipated tour-de-force that is both compassionate and intellectually stimulating, this book deepens in a new and innovate style his engagement with themes such as economics, ecopsychology, leadership, aggression and violence, the role of the individual in progressive politics, and sexuality and spirituality in political contexts. The reader is encouraged to move beyond conventional professional or academic discourse by the inclusion of experiential exercises in the text. In this way, activism and analysis, public and private, therapeutic and more-than-personal are all brought together in a satisfying yet challenging synthesis.

Chapter One
Therapy thinking and political process—possibilities and limitations

As Robert Musil put it, “I am convinced not only that what I say is wrong, but that what will be said against it will be wrong as well. Nonetheless, a beginning must be made; for the truth is to be found not in the middle of such a subject but around the outside, like a sack which changes shape every time a new opinion is stuffed in, but grows firmer all the while” (Musil, 1990, p. 167).

The intention in this first chapter is to test out and explore the boundaries that we have been told exist between therapy and politics, between the inner world and the outer world, between being and doing, and even between what many people still cannot resist calling “feminine” approaches to life and “masculine” approaches to life—no matter how problematic those words are.

I begin by addressing the questions “Why me, why here, why now?” Then there follows a discussion of how politics in the West is changing in the direction of what I call “transformative politics”. Third, I ask the question “Can therapists really make a difference in the world today?” Fourth, there is a markedly experiential section entitled “the inner politician”. Finally, to conclude, there are a few reflections on the relationship between psychotherapy and politics.

Why me, why here, why now?

The bases for these ideas about therapy thinking and political process do not only lie in my experience as a clinical practitioner. They stem from my involvement as a consultant with politicians, parties, and activist groups in several counties. I have also conducted workshops with members of the public in many places across the world. These activities have given me an indication of how useful and effective perspectives derived from psychotherapy might be in the formation of policy in creating new ways of thinking about the political process, and in the resolution of conflict. It is difficult to present therapy thinking so that mainstream politicians—for example, a US Presidential candidate or a senior Democrat Senator or a Labour Party committee—will take it seriously. And the problem is only slightly reduced when the politicians and organisations are “alternative” or more activist.

Many have written that politics in Western countries is broken and in a mess; we urgently need new ideas and approaches. Psychotherapists, alongside economists, social scientists, religious people, environmentalists, and others, can contribute to a general transformation of politics. Today’s politicians leave many people with a visceral sense of deep despair and disgust; this reaction may have been present for a long time but it seems to have intensified in the twenty-first century. The politicians lack integrity, imagination, and new ideas. Across the globe, and in response to the challenge, a search is on to remodel politics. Psychotherapy’s contribution to this search depends on opening up a two-way psychosocial street between inner realities and the world of politics. We need to balance attempts to understand the secret politics of the inner world of emotional, personal, and family experiences with the secret psychology of pressing outer world matters such as leadership, the economy, environmentalism, nationalism, and war.

Our inner worlds and our private lives reel from the impact of policy decisions and the existing political culture. Why, then, do our policy committees and commissions not have a psychotherapist sitting on them as part of a range of experts? This is not a call for a committee of therapists! But just as a committee will often have a statistician present, whose role might not be fully enjoyed by the other members, so, too, there should be a therapist at the conference table. We would expect to find therapists having views to offer on social issues that involve personal and familial relationships or matters to do with mental health but they may also have ideas to contribute on the “hard” issues as well—war, violence, poverty, and the economy.

Is it possible to imagine a world in which people are encouraged to sharpen their half-thought out, intuitive political ideas and commitments so as to be able to take more effective political action as and when they want to? There are probably buried sources of political wisdom in many people, particularly those who do not seem likely to function in such a way. More and more, I look to introverted people, the shy or ashamed ones, to poets and mystics, to unprivileged voices, to the older generation who seem to get angrier about the state of the world rather than more accepting of it, and those whose attitude to politics is to avoid involvement—these individuals may know much that the more active, talkative, educated, and lucky among us do not. They are a great aid in finding out how secret things, such as childhood experiences, intimate relationships, fantasies (including sexual fantasies), dreams, and bodily sensations, might be reframed and turned to useful political ends.

Thinking about those who usually do not say much, I find that they make a profound contribution to what I call “political clinics”. These are large group events, often composed of people who have nothing to do with therapy and psychology at all, but who come together to explore their emotional and feelings-based reactions to major political themes such as terrorism, the Middle East, racism, homelessness, surveillance (to give a few examples). I have discovered that people who say “I am not interested in politics” are often deceiving themselves, caught in a reaction formation. Then it becomes clear, as the event unfolds, that they are indeed extremely interested, knowledgeable, and wise about politics, but have always doubted, because they have been taught to doubt, that the inward emotional reactions they are having are a legitimate part of political process. We have educated our peoples in the Western countries, not to deny that they have emotions about politics, because that would be impossible, but to put those emotions rather low down on the scale of what we value in official political debate and political discussion.

Sometimes, at the conclusion of these political clinics, we start to talk in terms of citizens as “therapists of the world” who have a large set of usable countertransferences to the political culture in which they live. This constitutes an intellectual challenge to much psychological theorising about citizens, especially in psychoanalysis, wherein the citizen is regarded as a kind of baby, who has a transference and a collection of fantasies towards the “parental” society in which she or he lives. Flipping that round, so that the citizen is seen as a kind of therapist or parent figure towards the society, can have a radical, uplifting, and empowering effect. It overturns the tradition, especially in psychoanalysis (e.g., Richards, 1984), in which the citizen is seen as the baby and society as the parent. This claim, that the citizen is capable of being the therapist (or the parent) of the world is one that embodies many possibilities as we struggle to work out what citizens are “for” when their voices are distorted by the mass media, and what their internal life will be in a highly fraught political climate dominated by corporations and cartels.

Transformative politics

We move on now to the second section of the chapter, which is about how politics is slowly changing in Western countries. We are at a very interesting moment in political consciousness. What used to be an elitist insight about how everything is secretly political is now on the verge of becoming an element in mass awareness. For years now, feminists, academics, intellectuals, some therapists and analysts have lived happily with the idea that the personal, psychological, and private worlds of individuals are full of collective political tensions, dynamics, and energies. But actually this has been a superior form of knowing, a political Gnosticism. So “we” intellectuals and academics knew that politics has expanded its definition to include all the private stuff. But the people, the masses, did not. They continued to be taught, but now accept it less, that politics means official politics, party-politics, congressional or parliamentary politics, power politics, the politics that money can buy, and so on. What has helped to accelerate the democratisation of the personal-is-political insight has been the huge eruptions of feelings over certain events in recent years. A level of affect is achieved that turns mere events into what can justly be called archetypal or at least numinous experiences: 9/11, the reaction to Princess Diana’s death, natural disasters. The most ruthlessly successful politicians of recent times, such as Tony Blair, have perceived this move into general awareness of the elitist, Gnostic, private knowledge about how politics has changed and hence have decided to couch their utterances in the language of the emotions. How sincere they are about this is a moot point.

Another way in which politics has changed is that it has become more of a transformative process. By this I mean that engagement in political activity and processes of personal growth and development are seen increasingly as the same thing or at least two sides of a coin. If one interviews people active in anti-capitalist politics, or in the sustainable development/climate change/environmental movements, or in certain sectors of feminism and the men’s movements, or in ethno-politics, one sees that what they are doing is, in many respects, a form of self-healing that is familiar to psychotherapists. So politics starts to carry an overtly psychological, transformative burden. Sadly, this kind of transformative politics is not only progressive and left-leaning, it can also be spotted in many right-wing and reactionary movements.

A third way in which politics has changed is that there is now something which could be called “political energy” to be considered alongside political power. Political power is what you would imagine it is. It is control over resources, such as land, or water, or oil—or indeed, information and imagery. Especially today, the issue of who controls information and imagery, for example on the Internet and satellite television, is almost as important as the issue of who controls oil or water. Political power is held by the people you would expect to hold it: men, white people, the middle and upper-middle classes, and those who run the big institutions of finance, the military, and the academic and professional worlds, including the world of mental health.

Political energy is different. It is almost the opposite of political power. Political energy involves idealism and an imaginative and visionary focus on certain political problems with a view to making a creative impact in relation to those problems (not necessarily with the goal of “solving” them). Political energy seeks out more political energy in an attempt to build up to critical mass. It is different from political power because people who have political energy, imagination, commitment, idealism, real compassion, almost by definition lack political power. And, equally, almost by definition in contemporary societies, people who have political power tend to lack political energy. This is a fundamental and radical claim that I am sure will be much disputed.

Indeed, the very idea of political energy will upset some intellectual apple carts, for most academics cannot entertain the notion. Energy does not exist they say; it is only a mechanistic nineteenth-century way of looking at things. Be that as it may, Jung suggested that, contra Freud’s conception of libido, there was a neutral form of psychic energy that could run down various “channels”, citing biological, psychological, spiritual, and moral channels. My proposal is that there is also a social channel and that a subset of the social channel will have to do with politics and political energy. Hence, I use the term “energy” in both a metaphorical and a literal sense.

Jung’s further idea that there is a specifically moral channel for psychic energy is extremely interesting, chiming with much evolutionary, ethological, genetic, and psychoanalytic thought—Klein’s idea of an innate superego, Winnicott’s insistence that children have an inborn sense of guilt and hence are not born amoral, Milner’s counsel that we stop seeing morality solely as something implanted in children by parents and society. Freud foreshadowed this train of thought with his remarks about the innate disposition of the self-preservative instincts to become more socially oriented (Freud, 1905, p. 176). (See Samuels, 1989, pp. 194–215 for a fuller discussion of “original morality”.)

People with political energy are doing something rather new and different in the Western world today compared to what those with political power are doing. This thought can be liberatory if you are working in a small neighbourhood group, or a social and political project with limited resources and support, or alongside people who have been abused, or trying to build up an environmentally informed movement for sustainable development and worldwide economic justice. If you are doing any or all of these things then you probably do not have much power. It is very easy then to judge yourself the way the conventional political world might judge you—as a waste of space when it comes to “real” politics.

But the very notion of political energy is intended to shift this way of thinking. Very often when I talk about this, people say “Yes, and we wonder what would happen if our country valued political energy as much as it values political power”. If political energy is not to be found in the sites of official politics, then where may we find it? Politics has left its home base and gone out into the world to redefine itself and find other and new places to settle. I am not advocating removing political energy from moribund formal institutions; this has been happening in Western societies anyway over many years in one of the most significant sociocultural and collective psychological shifts to take place in the developed countries since the end of the Second World War. A striking feature of the past thirty years in such societies has been the spontaneous growth of new social and cultural networks. More and more people are now involved in these networks—increasingly aware that what they are doing may be regarded as political. The contemporary elasticity in our definition of politics is not something that has been worked out by intellectuals. Nor has there been a concerted effort to achieve such a shift, for the new social movements operate in isolation from each other. Yet they have something psychological in common. They share in an emotional rejection of “big” politics, its pomposity and self-interest, its mendacity and complacency. They share a Weltanschauung and set of values based on ideas of living an intelligible and purposeful life in spite of the massive social and financial forces that mitigate against intelligibility and purpose. Such social movements include environmentalism, groups working for the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, animal liberation, complementary medicine, spiritual and religious groups including paganism and neo-paganism, rock and other kinds of music and art, finding God in the new physics, sports, organic farming—and psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and counselling.

At one point (Samuels, 1993), I referred to the social movements as participating in a “rescralisation” of politics. “Sacral” means holy, and the intent was to pick up on the attempt to get a sense of purpose, decency, aspiration, and meaning back into political culture. When I considered attempts by analysts and psychotherapists to do their bit, I have no alternative but to count them as part of this general, worldwide resacralising movement. So, too, the relatively new academic discipline of psychosocial studies. Psychotherapists and academics may want to be different and special but in their attempts to work the borders between psychotherapy and society they are part of something bigger, even if the rhetoric sometimes feels too “New Age-y”.

Psychotherapists tend to share with other resacralisers a sense of disgust with present politics and politicians. In political clinics, this is often a literal and physical disgust, involving the gagging reflex, an ancient part of the nervous system, absolutely necessary for survival in a world full of literal and metaphorical toxins.

Let me conclude this section by accepting that a transformation of politics is not going to happen in any kind of simple or speedy way and may not happen at all. There is an impossibility to the whole project because the social realm is as inherently uncontrollable as the drives and images of the inner world and the unconscious. Once human desire enters into a social system—as it always will—that system cannot function predictably (I return to this theme in Chapter Three, on economics). There are no final solutions to social questions. The social issues which face Western societies are as incorrigible, as unresponsive to treatment, as the psychological issues that individuals face.

Moreover, many will dispute that the cumulative public significances of these movements is positive. It can be argued that the proliferation of new networks and cultural practices is merely a further symptom of social malaise—a selfish retreat into personal, individual preoccupations, reflecting an abandonment of the aspiration to truly political values. It can also be pointed out that reactionary, fundamentalist, religious movements can be seen as attempting, in their own rather different terms, a form of resacralisation. But what gets highlighted when religious fundamentalism is brought into the picture is the vastness of the energy pool available for the political reforms that are urgently needed (see Chapter Eight).

Can therapists really make a difference?

Although enthusiastic about psychotherapy’s role in participating in the refreshing of political culture, I am also somewhat sceptical. So my answer to this question “Can therapists really make a difference?” is both “No” and “Yes”. Let’s deal with “No” first, with the pessimism. James Hillman and Michael Ventura (1992) wrote a book called We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. It is fairly clear what they were getting at—that psychotherapy makes little or no impact on an unjust world and that people in therapy are cut off from taking responsibility for ameliorating such injustice (they are cut off from their political energy by therapy that takes all available psychic energy for its own project of personal exploration). Yet I think that a much more accurate title for their book would have been We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy Trying to Improve the World but the World’s Stayed Pretty Much the Same. For it is not a new project for psychotherapists to want to do something in relation to the world (see Foster, Moskowitz, & Javier, 1996; Totton, 2000). Freud wanted it, Jung wanted it, and the great pioneers of humanistic psychotherapy such as Maslow, Rogers, and Perls all wanted it as well. All of these people and their followers invited the world into therapy but the world didn’t show up for its first therapy session. There are good reasons why the world didn’t show up, not just resistance. One reason is that therapists so much want and need to be right! (Me too, this shadow issue of the analyst’s maddening rectitude is not one I pretend to have fully dealt with). Therapists want to reduce everything to the special knowledge that they have. This kind of reductionism gets therapy a bad name when it comes to political and social issues. For example, I remember reading in the London Guardian an article—later the object of intense ridicule—by a Kl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Therapy thinking and political process—possibilities and limitations
• CHAPTER TWO Aggression and leadership
• CHAPTER THREE The economic psyche
• CHAPTER FOUR Against nature
• CHAPTER FIVE Making a difference—what can an individual do?
• CHAPTER SIX Promiscuities: politics, psychology, imagination, and spirituality (and a note on hypocrisy)
• CHAPTER SEVEN Political anatomy of spirituality
• CHAPTER EIGHT The fascinations of fundamentalism
• CHAPTER NINE The plural father
• CHAPTER TEN First catch your child
• CHAPTER ELEVEN Jung and anti-Semitism: definitely not a therapy for politics
• REFERENCES
• INDEX