Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics

The selected works of Andrew Samuels

Andrew Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415707923
• eBook ISBN: 9781317643845
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Andrew Samuels is one of the best known figures internationally in the fields of psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, relational psychoanalysis and counselling, and in academic studies in those areas. His work is a blend of the provocative and original together with the reliable and scholarly. His many books and papers figure prominently on reading lists in clinical and academic teaching contexts.

This self-selected collection, Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics, brings together some of Samuels' major writings at the interface of politics and therapy thinking. In this volume, he includes chapters on the market economy; prospects for eco-psychology and environmentalism; the role of the political Trickster, particularly the female Trickster; the father; relations between women and men; and his celebrated and radical critique of the Jungian idea of 'the feminine principle'. Clinical material consists of his work with parents and on the therapy relationship. The book concludes with his seminal and transparent work on Jung and anti-semitism and an intriguing account of the current trajectory of the Jungian field.

Samuels has written a highly personal and confessional introduction to the book. Each chapter also has its own topical introduction, written in a clear and informal style. There is also much that will challenge the long-held beliefs of many working in politics and in the social sciences. This unique collection of papers will be of interest to psychotherapists, Jungian analysts, psychoanalysts and counsellors – as well as those undertaking academic work in those areas.

CHAPTER 1

THE MIRROR AND THE HAMMER

The politics of resacralization

Retrospective introduction

I wrote this as the first chapter of The Political Psyche in 1993. I wanted to challenge the distinctions that most people accepted – for example, between inner and outer worlds, or between therapy and political action. I was probably a bit too enthusiastic about the role that what I now call therapy thinking could play. But that could be seen as a laudable fault.

You see, Hillman and Venture had just produced a book called We’ve Had a Hundred years of Psychotherapy and the World’s getting Worse. It contained a put down of the therapy project, as if all that was now needed was an engagement with social and political ills. I felt this book was misleading in that it totally ignored the long history of psychology and psychotherapy’s engagement with the social and political world and I wanted to set my attempt to bring therapy thinking to bear in an accurate and respectful historical context (Freud, Jung, the humanistic pioneers).

I also wanted to set out the important paradox that you can’t have personal growth and change in a sullied world, and you can’t change the world if you don’t change something in the people living in it.

I am really surprised at how little has changed! The things that worried and interested me herein – attitudes to the market economy, inequalities of wealth, social movements (more recently we have had Occupy), the feelings of disgust and alienation from politics, focus on the environment, the buried spirituality in many political ventures (‘resacralization’) – they all still prevail more than twenty years later. Therapy thinking has not really achieved much by way of improvement – but then nor has anything else. So the chapter seems to me to be anything but a relic; it is applicable in today’s contexts as well.

The chapter also contains many definitions of terms, and hence is useful for teaching and study purposes.

Depth psychology and political transformation

This chapter is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of non-violent political change. It is a contribution to the long-standing ambition of psychotherapy 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 chapter 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 fin de 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 chapter, 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 rambling 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 Psychoanalysis, 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 Psychoanalytical 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 chapter 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 [of The Political Psyche, not included in this selection], 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 ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction
• 1 The mirror and the hammer: The politics of resacralization
• 2 The lion and the fox: Morality, Trickster and political transformation
• 3 Against nature
• 4 Original morality in a depressed culture
• 5 A new deal for women and men
• 6 The good-enough father of whatever sex
• 7 Beyond the feminine principle
• 8 Countertransference and the imaginal world
• 9 The image of the parents in bed: From primal scene to pluralism
• 10 Jung, anti-semitism and the Nazis
• 11 Nations, leaders and a psychology of difference
• 12 Schools of analytical psychology
• 13 New developments in the post-Jungian field
• Index