The Political Psyche

Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138888463
• eBook ISBN: 9781317497929
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What can depth psychology and politics offer each other?

In The Political Psyche Andrew Samuels shows how the inner journey of analysis and psychotherapy and the passionate political convictions of the outer world are linked. He brings an acute psychological perspective to bear on public themes such as the market economy, environmentalism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. But, true to his aim of setting in motion a two-way process between depth psychology and politics, he also lays bare the hidden politics of the father, the male body, and of men's issues generally. A special feature of the book is an international survey into what analysts and psychotherapists do when their patients/clients bring overtly political material into the clinical setting. The results, including what the respondents reveal about their own political attitudes, destabilize any preconceived notions about the political sensitivity of analysis and psychotherapy.

This Classic Edition of the book includes a new introduction by Andrew Samuels.

Part I
The political psyche

In Part I, I make some proposals about the relationship between depth psychology and politics. Far from abandoning what has been learned from clinical work, my ideas involve the discovery of new uses for clinical methodology in the making of political and cultural analyses. But, at the same time, the methods and theories of clinical depth psychology cannot remain unaffected by the new uses to which they are being put. I elaborate the idea of ‘the political development of the person’ and other related concepts as showing the viability of my attempt to politicize the clinical project.

I explore key contemporary political issues from a depth psychological outlook. These issues include the nature of politics itself, the psychological and political dynamics of the market economy, questions of economic inequality and the distribution of wealth, and an assessment of the cultural impact of environmentalism. To carry out the expansion of what is usually considered to be ‘the political’, I deploy collective, cultural figures such as the Trickster and Hermes.

Chapter 1
The mirror and the hammer

The politics of resacralization

Depth psychology and political transformation

This book is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of non-violent political change. It is a contribution to the longstanding ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that would, in Freud’s words, ‘understand the riddles of the world’. ¹ I will be trying to bring depth psychology as a whole, and the particular experience of clinical analysis, to bear on politics. An engagement of depth psychology with politics makes a contribution to social science, social theory and the other human sciences. ² But the book is also oriented in the opposite direction. Bringing an understanding of the political world to bear on the theories of depth psychology and the practices of clinical analysis, leading to a concern for humankind as well as an absorption in one’s personal problems.

By ‘politics’ I mean the concerted arrangements and struggles within an institution, or in a single society, or between the countries of the world for the organization and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power. Politics concerns the way in which power is held or deployed by the state, by institutions, and by sectional interests to maintain survival, determine behavior, gain control over others and, more positively perhaps, enhance the quality of human life. Politics implies efforts to change or transform these arrangements and efforts to maintain them. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation to serve the interests of the powerful as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food, water or oil.

On a more personal level, there is a second kind of politics. Here, political power reflects struggles over agency, meaning the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation. This is a feeling-level politics. But politics also refers to a crucial interplay between these two dimensions, between the private and public dimensions of power. There are connections between economic power and power as expressed on an intimate, domestic, level. Power is a process or network as much as a stable factor. This version of political power is demonstrated experientially: In family organization, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals.

Where the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect or even meld there is a special role for depth psychology in relation to political change and transformation. The tragicomic crisis of our finde siècle civilization incites us to challenge the boundaries that are conventionally accepted as existing between the external world and the internal world, between life and reflection, between extraversion and introversion, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between the political development of the person and the psychological development of the person, between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity have political roots; they are not as ‘internal’ as they seem.

The political tasks of modern democracy are similar to the psychological tasks of modern therapy and analysis. In both areas, there is a fight between consciousness, liberation and alterity on the one hand and suppression, repression and omnipotent beliefs in final truths on the other. Psychological and political processes share an uncertain outcome. Hence, the demarcation between the inner world of psychology and the outer world of politics has no permanent existence. The Umwelt is both inside and outside. This congruency of politics and depth psychology is demonstrated by the ubiquity of political metaphors that can depict personality: The ‘government’ signifies the ego, the ‘citizens’ signify constellations of object relations, social problems signify psychopathology. In this book, I do not in fact make use of notions such as ‘the class system inside one’s head’, but I do draw conclusions from the existence of such notions about public referents of private matters.

From its beginnings, depth psychology has been interested in the world of politics. In his paper entitled ‘The claims of psycho-analysis to the interest of the non-psychological sciences’, written in 1913, Freud staked a claim for the proactive capacity of psychoanalysis

to throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions – on religion, morality, justice, and philosophy. … Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. ³

Jung made a similar point about the relationship of depth psychology and politics in a more reactive vein in 1946 in his preface to a collection of his essays on Nazi Germany:

We are living in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame, internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of chaos. … This critical state of things has such a tremendous influence on the psychic life of the individual that the analyst … feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting room. … The psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history, even if his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not mention his duties as a citizen, which confront him with a similar task. ⁴

At times, it seems that Freud and Jung were as interested in the broad sweep of cultural evolution and in an engagement with collective psychology as they were in their day-to-day work with patients. Certainly, there is a tension between their cultural and clinical projects and this is a tension that is still with their descendants today. In the last twenty-five years, we have witnessed the growth of psychoanalysis as an academic discipline, whether as a human, social or emancipatory science. The same is now beginning to happen in analytical psychology (inevitably, twenty-five years later). Of course, the origins of this intellectual movement go much further back to ‘Freudian’ writers like Harold Lasswell, Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Norman O. Brown, or to ‘Jungians’ like Mircea Eliade and Herbert Read.

The gulf between depth psychology in the academy and depth psychology in the clinic is at its widest in Britain and in the United States, but even in Europe we can see signs of a similar rift. Academic depth psychology might involve a close textual study of Freud’s writings or comparative work that sets Freud alongside Heidegger or other important thinkers. Literary and film criticism, cultural and gender studies, psychohistory and psychobiography, sectors within anthropology, sociology and political studies – all may quite fairly be reckoned as aligned with academic depth psychology. Research into the outcome of psychotherapeutic treatment and diagnostic studies may also be understood as academic. Though academic depth psychology often seems more at home with an insertion into the political field than clinical depth psychology does, it lacks a vehicle for engaging with political issues in a pragmatic form while retaining a psychological orientation.

However, something new is rumbling within the clinical world. In 1991, just before the Gulf War, a protest meeting was called in London by the Medical Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons and the Study Group on Psychosocial Issues in the Nuclear Age. It was held at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, a highly significant fact in itself, and psychoanalysts were prominent on the platform. What is more, over a quarter of the members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society have joined a group called Psychoanalysts for the Prevention of Nuclear War. ⁵ In Britain, and all over the world, clinicians and some who have voluntarily given up clinical practice are arguing and writing about politics in a way that they did not just a few years ago.

It seems that the existence of a rupture between depth psychology in the consulting room and depth psychology in the political world is being challenged, if not exactly closed. One can tell that something significant is going on by the existence of fierce opposition to it from those who regard the clinical as an untouchable, privileged category, on the basis of its contribution to the alleviation of human suffering. ⁶

Although I abhor that kind of clinical triumphalism, I do not suggest in this book that we should close all the consulting rooms. This is because I can see that clinical practice may be something other than a bastion of possessive individualism and narcissistic introspection. It is right to criticize myopic (and greedy) clinicians who cannot apperceive that their work has a political and cultural location and implication. But it is not right to indulge in simplistic thinking that would do away with the entire clinical project of depth psychology. Without their connection to a clinical core, why should anyone listen to analysts at all? The rejection of the clinical forecloses what is, for me, the central issue: The relations between the private and the public spheres of life. This foreclosure mimics the attitude of the most conservative, dyed-in-the-wool clinicians and mental health professionals. The high-profile apostates of therapy are as terrified of exploring the relations between the personal and the political as are the fanatical professional adherents of therapy. ⁷

The patients who come to see analysts and therapists are playing a part in these debates. In Chapter 10, I give the results of a questionnaire that was sent to analysts and psychotherapists in several countries. The questionnaire concerned political material brought to the consulting room, its prevalence, and how it is handled by the practitioner. From the survey, it seems clear that such material is being brought more frequently than before to the clinical setting, that the range of themes and problems covered is immense, that these do not invariably reflect the social situation or obvious preoccupations of the particular patient, and that practitioners are a bit puzzled as to how to interpret such material. Through this survey, I have found that practitioners are more reluctant than I thought they would be to interpret political material in terms of the internal world of the patient. I can confirm this puzzlement from my own experience. During the Gulf crisis of 1990–1, I was struck, not only by how some patients employed war imagery to express their internal states (predicted by theory), but also by how some patients communicated what looked like inner world material when actually they had a deep desire to talk about the Gulf crisis (not predicted by theory).

Depth psychology’s area of inquiry is moving on to make a new connection with the world of politics. However, I do not agree with the conceit that the unconscious itself has moved on and now resides outside the individual in the external world. The unconscious cannot be reified like that – and in any case who could doubt that the unconscious has always already been in the world as well as in the individual. The very idea of unconscious influence on action suggests that the unconscious itself influences the relations between the individual and the world. What has changed is our perception of what depth psychology can, and should do. (I return to the theme of the relations between the unconscious and the social world in Chapter 3.) Maybe it is now the turn of the external world to receive the ministrations of the depth psychologists. Maybe it is the external world that now clamors for our attention, for there is certainly much political pain and dis-ease ‘out there’ (as we say). But first we have to find out whether the political world does want something from depth psychology. (In the next chapter, I will unpack the word ‘world’.)

In spite of these developments, it has to be admitted that there is an intense reluctance in the non-psychological community to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have been or are being offered by analysts of every persuasion. I do not believe this reluctance can all be put down to resistance. There is something quite offensive about reductive interpretations of complex sociopolitical problems in exclusively psychological terms. The tendency to pan-psychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led me to wonder if any adequate methodology and ethos actually exist to make an engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible. ⁸

Depth psychology concerns a person’s subjective experience of social and cultural structures, and that is valuable in itself. But in this book I want to ask: Is there a special psychology of and for politics and culture? If so, what does the clinical practice of analysis and therapy with individuals or small groups contribute to the forming of such a psychology? And, conversely, I ask: What does a perspective taken from cultural or political analysis contribute to a clinical analysis of an individual or small therapy group? In what way is the personal political – and in what way is the political personal? Can these questions be answered without recourse to a totalizing politics, in a way that preserves and celebrates difference and diversity? A depth psychological approach to politics needs to be a humble one.

Depth psychology can help with these queries. In spite of claims that the age of psychology is over, we may be entering a period of cultural evolution in which it will become easier to work out the possible contribution of depth psychology to social science and politics. Modern social theory is concerned with identity, with difference, and with the relations between identity and difference. How am I wholly and unmistakably myself? How am I part of the mass, similar to or the same as others? These questions, which constitute the cri de cœur of what Anthony Giddens calls ‘late modernity’, shove us in the direction of psychology. ⁹ These are the pressing questions that the analytic patient brings to the consulting room – even in group therapy. And these are the crucial questions about that patient that the analyst has to contend with – to what extent can I encounter this person as a unique human being, to what extent must I react to him or her as a typical patient, to what extent as a combination of these? The political dimension of these psychological questions was summarized by Aristotle: ‘Similars do not constitute a state.’ Nor, we may add, do people with nothing at all in common. ¹⁰

The characteristic of late modernity to try to make use of knowledge about itself can be recast as a struggle within our culture to become self-conscious; our culture struggles to become psychological. Moreover, the pervasive presence of doubt, even ‘radical doubt’, as a ‘feature of modern critical reason’ and as a ‘general existential dimension of the contemporary social world’, suggests that the psychology that is already being embraced by late modernity is depth psychology, the psychology of not knowing, of unknowing, of interpretation and reinterpretation.

The late modern (and, if you like, the post-modern) age has reorganized the categories of time, space and place, using technology to deliteralize and overcome them, permitting the exercise of power-at-a-distance. In its overturning of the laws of nature, the age itself more and more resembles the unconscious. The speedy and multilevelled tone of life at the close of the twentieth century means that we often do not know what it is that has hurt or disturbed us though we do know we have been hurt or disturbed. We may only know what it was after the event. Such ‘deferred action’, to use the standard mistranslation of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, means that we are condemned to afterwardness and retrospection, required to fashion our response to hurtful and disturbing social changes out of a backward-looking stance. ¹¹ No wond...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the classic edition
• PART I The political psyche
• PART II The political person
• PART III The political therapist
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index