I'll begin by saying what I'm not writing about. I am not going to write about responsible ways of working with political or social or cultural or ecological material in the clinical session. I am not going to write about how a person gets his or her politics–the sources of their political attitudes and engagements.

I'll begin by saying what I'm not writing about. I am not going to write about responsible ways of working with political or social or cultural or ecological material in the clinical session. I am not going to write about how a person gets his or her politics–the sources of their political attitudes and engagements. I have written about those topics before. Nor am I going to talk about how citizens can function as therapists of the world using what we therapists call the countertransference. (I have established a method of teaching people in what I call political clinics to make use of their countertransferences to political themes: listening to their bodies, to their fantasies, to their apparently irrational responses to a particular political theme or problem).

Politics in many Western countries is broken and in a mess: we urgently need new ideas and approaches. My belief is that psychotherapy can contribute to a general transformation of politics. Therapists can ignore the demoralisation in the political realm and continue to focus on personal transformation. Or they can try to change self-concern into social and political concern, thereby helping to revitalise politics in our time.

Today's politicians leave most of us with a sense of deep despair and disgust. They lack integrity, imagination and new ideas. Across the globe–not only in the so-called 'first world' - a search is on to remodel politics. Psychotherapy's contribution to this search depends on opening up a two-way street between internal realities and the world of politics. We need to balance our attempts to understand the secret politics of the internal world of emotional, personal and family experiences, with attempts to reveal the secret psychology of pressing outer world matters such as leadership, the economy, environmentalism and nationalism. So it's about balancing a search for the secret politics of the internal world with a search for the secret psychology of the external world.

These are the sorts of questions that need answering:

1. How happy are we with the current visions of political "reality" on offer and the way the major political parties seem to see the future?
2. Do we agree with the goals that our political leaders have set for us?
3. Can we do better? If so, what must change in us as individuals, as well as in society?
4. How must our political system alter to regain the respect of alienated, excluded groups and individuals, including young people in particular?

If people sharpen their half-thought-out intuitive political ideas and commitments, then they are more able to take effective political action when they want to. Their desire to do so will also increase. Now I think there are buried sources of political wisdom within everyone. These are found in the apparently private reactions we have to what is going on in the political world. Yet such private reactions have no obvious outlet and in general terms tend to remain secret. We need to explore the ways in which these secret things, the kind that are usually regarded as supremely and appropriately private, such as childhood experiences, intimate relationships, fantasies (including sexual fantasies), dreams and bodily sensations, might be re-framed and turned to useful and transformative political ends.

Our inner worlds and our private lives reel from the impact of policy decisions and the existing political culture. I am fond of asking why our policy committees and commissions don't have a psychotherapist sitting on them as part of a spectrum of experts? I'm equally fond of saying that 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 always be fully appreciated by the other members, so, too, there should be an equally unpopular therapist at the conference table.

Phrases like "emotional intelligence" and "emotional literacy" encapsulate calls for an increase in self-knowledge. But such phrases can be taken as addressing more than the private side of life. The idea of emotional literacy can be extended into the public sphere, so that we can envision a citizenry wanting to engage with politics in a feeling-based way, secure in the knowledge that they will still be coherent.

One poignant contribution that a psychotherapy viewpoint might make to political life is to help people face up to the inevitability of disappointment. Disappointment is a theme which a lot of people have been interested in recently. Susie Orbach has written about it. Ian Craig (who is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex) has written about it. I took a workshop to the Labour Party Conference prior to the election called 'Preparing for Disappointment'! It is one of the more valuable outcomes of psychotherapy, derived from the struggles experienced in the process itself: people realise that it is possible to gather the strength to push through the disappointment barrier and struggle on.

Many people involved in psychological work–like therapy - hold that politics is a disgusting business, and that getting involved in it sullies one, inevitably leading to a loss of self-respect. People concerned with therapy often have little time for politics. Equally many politicians, mainstream or activist, scorn introspection and psychological reflection as a waste of time. We need to question the conventional wisdom that there is a divide between the political life and what we usually understand as personal creativity. Might it be possible to be effective in politics without losing your self-respect? Certainly the stakes are high: by not responding to the crisis in politics, we risk losing a place in political life altogether. Such matters will then be left to the media whose own use of psychology seems more like a symptom than a potential cure.

The media's star columnists and pundits certainly toss around psychological terms when discussing politicians' behaviour. But mostly they are just engaging in pseudo-psychological analyses of the 'character' of our leaders, attempting to explain how they got that way: Was it Bill Clinton's alcoholic stepfather who made him over-anxious to please everybody? Did Churchill's sense of being unloved by his beautiful mother and his awareness of his father's failures give him the hunger to win public acclaim? It is a fruitless exercise, a parallel spectacle to that of the politicians themselves when they offer up their psychologically simplistic nostrums about 'virtue', 'trust', 'vision' and 'community'. We can no longer look to leaders for what is required, any more than we can rely on the media to give us insight into the political process. Instead, maybe no bad thing though very hard in the short term, we are thrown back upon ourselves.

However fascinating it may be to play the parlour game of speculating on the psychological motivations of today's politicians, it may be more significant to find out what would happen to the political system if citizens were to work on their own political self-awareness–it they got in touch with the 'politician within' each citizen. Then there would be a different basis from which to question the motivations of the real politicians.

Politics will always be about power and the struggle for power. It will always be about the contest for control of resources, the conflict of sectional interests. Always. But politics nowadays encompasses a crucial interplay between the public and private dimensions of power. This feminist insight, which used to be the possession of an intellectual and academic elite, is today poised to enter mass consciousness: these days, the political has become personal. Politics of both a destructive and a creative kind show up in family patterns, gender relations, connections between wealth and (mental) health, control of information and accompanying imagery, and in religious and artistic assumptions. More and more people are becoming aware of the way in which the political irradiates everything about us. It is no longer a sophisticated thing to notice.

Politics has always been psychological, but the fact that it is a psychological or emotional business is usually presented as a very unhappy state of affairs, something to be overcome or disowned. 'Irrational' responses to demagogues like Hitler are cited, as though most political responses should be purely rational. I think attitudes would be different if we learned to trust and to understand our psychological–that is to say irrational - responses to political events.

Whether one looks at the microcosm of an individual in a local community, or the macrocosm of the global village, we are flooded with psychological themes, often of an apocalyptic nature. Thinking about fundamentalism, nationalism, ethnic cleansing, poverty, planetary despoliation, child abuse and the war of the sexes might make one want to give up on the human psyche. But–and this is where the idea of therapy comes in–we could begin to try to work out why we can be so destructive and unpleasant. As in therapy, we can pause in our rush to judge our political performance and instead reflect on its psychological roots. Politics embodies the psyche of a people. If there are creative and benevolent aspects to that psyche that do not show up in the political life of a people, then we must ask 'why'? Where has the goodness gone?

At the beginning of the enterprise called psychotherapy, pioneers such as Freud and Jung felt themselves to be social critics as much as personal therapists. The great founders of humanistic psychology, such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Fritz Perls, recognised the same thing–that they had in their hands a tool of social criticism and a possible agent of social change for the better, just as much as something that would help individuals in emotional difficulties.

In the 1920's and beyond–even to this day, the Frankfurt School tried to marry Freud and Marx. Wilhelm Reich situated his work in the space between communism and psychoanalysis and Ronnie Laing was in a similar though somewhat different tradition. Increasingly, in the 1990's, psychoanalysts began again to think about society, as the titles of their books show: The Analyst in the Inner City, or Constructing the Self, Constructing America. Then there are feminist psychotherapists (such as Susie Orbach) and gay affirmative counsellors (like Claudette Kulkarni) whose work necessarily incorporates a social perspective. Many therapists work in social and communal institutions and have brought psychodynamic and other insights to clinical engagements with people living in poverty. Not all therapy work has been done with the well-heeled.

So the project of linking therapy and the world is clearly not a new one. Yet very little progress seems to have been made. To play with the title of a much cited critique of psychotherapy, we have had a hundred years of psychotherapy's desire to change the world, but the world has stayed pretty much the same.

More therapists than ever want psychotherapy to realise the social and political potential that its founders perceived in it. But there is a large gap between wish and actuality, between wanting to play a role in social and political life and actually playing that role and getting results. We need to acknowledge that anybody, not just a therapist, who seeks to improve anything in this world is up against massive impersonal forces that do not want things to change: the economic system, the workings and institutions of global capitalism, patriarchy and its ways. They stand in the way. But there is another, more paradoxical problem, another obstacle: the human unconscious and the human soul are truly the sources of imagination, creativity and hope–but they are also to some extent the sources of our problems. In its cruel and negative conservative aspects, the unconscious resists improvement and change and contributes to the difficulties human beings face. This could be seen as a therapist's philosophy of life. The very thing that gives us hope that solutions might be found is also the source of the problems that cry out for solutions.

There are also other reasons, entrenched in the history of psychotherapy and its institutions and practices that have blighted the hopes therapists have long nurtured to provide therapy for the world. In asking ourselves why the world did not turn up for its first session, we need to acknowledge the role of the seemingly incurable psychotherapeutic reductionism and triumphalism that parallels that of the media. Psychotherapists write articles for newspapers about the phallic symbolism of cruise missiles going down ventilator shafts in Bhagdhad; they call Mrs Thatcher a restorative container for British infantile greed. The Jungians go in for an archetypal version of this kind of reductionism–the military-industrial complex as the work of the Greek god Hephaestus; feminism as the legacy of Artemis. What is the point of this? Maybe the world was right not to show up! It is startling, when talking politics with therapists (and I think I'm guilty myself at times of it) how strong the desire is to have your psychotherapeutic theories proved right–stronger, sometimes, than the initial desire to make a contribution.

A second reason for failure has to do with psychotherapy's very bad record over the years at 'governing the soul', to use the caustic phrase of sociologist Nikolas Rose. One does not have to give up therapy work (like James Hillman), or write a book against therapy (like one-time psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson), or launch attacks on 'therapism' (like novelist Fay Weldon), to note that the many attempts by therapists to work in the social domain have been disasters. Consider the bungled attempts by therapists to deal with shell shock and battle neurosis in the First World War (memorably depicted in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration), or the cultural biases of psychological testing, or various therapists' cooperation with oppressive regimes–including Jung's ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology.

Then there's the whole question of therapy's weddedness to normative and universalistic standards in relation to gender, parenting and sexuality. The psychotherapy profession as a whole still fails–appallingly–to thoroughly depathologise homosexuality, for instance, or to offer realistic support and hope to lone parent families. With all the talk around the world of multiculturalism and biculturalism, the claim of psychotherapy to universality is damaging. Yet it is difficult to get beyond it, to come to terms with the idea that the Oedipus complex may be characteristic only of fin-de-siècle Vienna (the last fin de siècle), and Jung's belief that women should not wear trousers as pure 'Zurichocentrism'.

In spite of this depressing litany, there are some grounds for cautious optimism. First of all, the definition of politics is actually changing. It is changing to make more of a place for psychology. Similarly, how we define spirituality and the whole aspirational side of life is also being revised but in a more social or political direction. Even the breakdown of language in these spheres may in fact present us with an opportunity of sorts. I mean the way the language of the heart (inner world language) and the language of politics (outer world language) have become so separate that to mingle them sounds like an embarrassing woolly-headedness. I want to mingle them because I think we have a chance now to create a new, hybrid language and to practice using it.

A further ground for cautious optimism is that the politics of difference with which many Western societies are presently engaged have started to spawn a psychology of difference. This is a psychology based on experience, rather than on definition. That means trying to understand the actual experience–the actual experience - of being a Jew or Irish or a Maori or a woman or a lesbian or a man or a gay man or a child–not an attempt to define what these people are, but an exploration of what being one of them is like. A psychology can be fashioned–cobbled together - from the experiences, testimonies and stories of these groups (which are not, of course, homogenous monoliths themselves).

In addition, the psychotherapy profession is beginning to pay more attention to its own political problems and biases, such as the historic discrimination against homosexuals, or the professional hierarchies that have ossified over the years. Issues such as improving access to treatment and training for members of minority groups, or those without conventional academic qualifications, and people without many financial resources, are firmly on the agenda these days–although there is still a lot of opposition to it.

As far as psychotherapy reductionism is concerned, a shift is taking place in favour of multidisciplinary work. There are attempts in many disciplines to find linkages with psychotherapy and its underlying psychologies (such as psychoanalysis): for example, in religious studies, sociology, art history and theory, and even fields such as law and theoretical physics. These disciplines are linking up not only with psychotherapy of course but with each other, in ways that the conventional Western academy could not have imagined 25 years ago.

Most important of all, perhaps, (and this is perhaps intellectually the most dense part of this piece) the nature of knowledge is changing, and this is a key theme for the twenty-first century: tacit, intuitive, feeling-based or fantasy-derived heuristic knowledge is finding a new welcome even in bastions of rationalist Enlightenment thought such as universities. The role of experience in learning is increasingly being valued as teachers and lecturers realise that a lowering of standards is not necessarily involved. Jung had a good term for it: he talked about undirected thinking; sometimes he called it fantasy thinking or intuitive thinking but thinking nonetheless. Bion, too, from psychoanalysis talks about thoughts and thinking, including under the rubric of thinking much that the Enlightenment, philosophical approach, would not include. We are living in a time of a massively shifting epistemology and its really very important for the whole project of linking psychotherapy with political processes.

Finally, psychotherapy's ability to contribute to political life may be helped if it continues to gain acceptance as a viable mode of treatment. The persistent suspicion that psychotherapy simply does not work has been one of the reasons for its manifest unpopularity as a new form of insightfulness in relation to politics. This point is so blindingly obvious that it took me a long time to realise, one of the reasons why psychotherapists are so unpopular on the political scene is because psychotherapy is so unpopular in the culture, and one of the main reasons for that is that, on the whole, people think it doesn't work. In recent years there have been numerous research findings that suggest that psychotherapy can alleviate people's psychological distress. As information about this research percolates, greater general acceptance of psychotherapy could result.

A moment ago I referred to a new hybrid language for psychotherapy and politics. The birth–the difficult birth - of such a language is demonstrated in this brief clinical vignette: Riccardo, an Italian businessman of thirty five, had a dream in which there was a powerful image of a beautiful mountain lake with deep, clear, crystalline water. The client's first association was that the lake was a symbol of his soul, or at least the potential in him to develop a deep, clear soulful attitude to life. His next and unexpected association was to the pollution on the Adriatic coast of Italy which had clogged up the coastal waters with algae and weeds. He began to explore the possible connections between 'soul' and 'pollution'. Can one's soul remain deep and clear while there is pollution in one's home waters? How could the lake, mysterious and isolated, relate to the mass tourism being damaged by algae in the Adriatic coast of Italy?

Then the client posed the question: who owns this lake? Who should control access to such a scarce resource? Who was responsible for protecting the lake's beauty from pollution? From personal issues, such as how his problems interfered with–that is polluted - the development of his potential, he moved to political issues such as pollution, environmental despoliation and the degradations–as well as the opportunities - of mass tourism. And he then moved back again from the political level to the personal one and then again to politics and back again. It does not have to be one or the other. The dream played a part in Riccardo's life choice to return to Italy, tell his parents that he was gay and, in his words, get 'involved' in some kind of politics.

Working these forbidden zones shows that it is legitimate and necessary–as we heard in that extraordinary ecopsychological performance - to question the conventional boundaries between the public and the private, the political and the personal, the external world and the internal world, the boundaries between being and doing, extraversion and introversion, and between politics and psychology–the boundaries between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world.

The transformation of politics I am proposing implies that outer world issues will not any more be looked at as divorced from the personal and subjective lives of the people involved. Transformative politics is also a profound form of self-expression, perhaps including the spiritual level, and it requires a new understanding of social action as part of the citizen's individuation which sadly means a new understanding of a lack of a commitment to social action as a limitation on individuation. Transformative politics aims at a resacralisation of culture, an attempt to generate a sense of meaning and purpose not only in private but also in public life. Power will always be the political issue but, in transformative politics, political power is complemented by the concept of political energy. Here, the question is whether and how the citizen or group of citizens is maximally concentrating imagination upon a designated problem–the concern is not only that they might quickly shift that problem or transcend it. The energy lies in and stems from the approach being taken to the problem. Political energy of this kind is available to the powerless and may exist in indirect proportion to political power: the less power the more energy; the more power the less energy. 'The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong...' in the words of Ecclesiastes. Perhaps that is why powerful leaders seem so uninspiring these days, so diminished in comparison with the degree of power that they have. And, if political energy can be tapped into and focussed outwards by the powerless, they may find that they do indeed have the means to change some of the things some of the time.

Let's look now at a number of key contemporary political themes and see how we might respond to them in a way that is both pragmatic and visionary. First of all, dispute within society: as far as this is concerned, could we entertain the idea of something called a National Institute for Reconciliation? Such a body would enable us to apply what psychotherapy has learned about resolving differences. The courts, when they had done with it, could make referrals of special cases where emotions have run exceptionally high to the NIR. Crucially, the remit would be not only to attempt to reach any kind of settlement, but to try to resolve the dispute in depth, leading to an emotional if not a factual reconciliation of the warring parties. Failure to reach such agreement would not be stigmatised since it would be accepted that too much agreement can spell dessication and there are also problems with skin-deep agreements reached to keep mediators happy. I often wonder how many of these international breakthroughs–Oslo and so forth–have in fact been erected on rather flimsy transferential foundations, the positive transference to the mediators.

Psychotherapy's contribution to transformative politics stems from its overall worldview. But there are a number of psychoanalytic ideas that make a direct contribution. For example the idea of good-enoughness is a significant addition to the political lexicon. It means avoiding the pitfalls of idealising or denigrating a leader (if he or she is a good enough leader), or the citizen idealising or denigrating him or herself (if he or she is a good-enough citizen). In the latter case, the good-enough citizen is one who can cope with the disappointment of not being as thoughtful about or effective in politics as consciously wished for. Failure to be the perfect citizen would not tip over into excessive civic self-depreciation. It is surprising, in fact, how many political problems respond to the 'good-enough' treatment. What happens when we say that we need a good-enough army, a good-enough economy, a good-enough education system? As soon as the idea of good-enoughness enters in, the expectation of perfection is reduced; the inevitable paralysis that follows on massive disappointment is avoided, and we are therefore more free both to complain and to act. Similarly, at the negative end of the spectrum, the temptation to subside into terminal despair at the disgusting state of things is also reduced. Relieved of our feelings of impotence–our inability to change anything - we become less likely to cede our autonomy and agency to others and more likely to take action ourselves.

It follows that leaders who are good-enough will be profoundly implicated in failure. Good-enough leaders will study why they did not or could not do what they had wanted to do and communicate the results of their study to the citizenry. They won't lie by claiming that they have done something they said they would do. They will say 'well, we hoped to do this; but we didn't manage it. What happened was this, and here's why we think we couldn't do what we wanted to do'. Everyone will start to speak a language of failure and we will have to learn a lot more about the management of disappointment.

I would like us to fantasise about setting up a National Failure Enquiry which would continually monitor why initiatives have out worked out as planned. Members of the main political parties would certainly sit on the NFE, whose proceedings would be widely circulated. Its function would not be to apportion blame, but to try to understand as fully as possible what happened, to try to come to terms with it and learn lessons for the future. This new approach to failure will mean that citizens will lose the 'out' of blaming leaders or the system, but they will get a greater opportunity to mould the world in which they and their friends, work mates and children live.

Another idea–what about a National Diversity Commission (NDC) to enable members of the different minority communities to share their experiences with each other and with members of the so-called majority community? The NDC would also be a place where the differing interests of women and men (and children) would be paid attention. I would propose as special topics for early consideration male powerlessness and homophobia. The Commission would establish fora where members of single issue social movements and similar groups could dialogue with each other. A fourth aspect of the NDC's work would be to set up an enquiry into national identity and psychology–in the UK this would be for the UK as a whole as well as for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Lastly, the NDC would do its best to benefit people in lone-parent families (who certainly come under diversity) and other statistically less 'normal' kinds of family organisations (for example families headed by two people of the same sex). The NDC would accomplish this by collecting testimony, establishing research projects and advocating new attitudes and policies. The NDC would be assisted by psychotherapists including therapists who come from ethnic and other minority backgrounds.

Transformative politics, associated as it is with psychology, breeds a psychological economics. At the heart of economics is a debate about human nature, one that is decisive when it comes to the formation of economic policy. Psychotherapists know that human beings are creative, collaborative, caring, cooperative–and the shadowy opposite of those things: they're also greedy, opportunistic, ruthless and destructive. They enjoy and suffer this bothness. Hence the psychology that must inform the debate over human nature, the psychology that is central to the economy, has to be an ambivalence tolerating psychology of bothness.

Could we imagine a National Emotional Audit (NEA) to assess other ways of marking progress in the economic and social realms besides statistical and financial reckonings? The emotional aspects of economic life are difficult to measure but, up to now, this has not been tried very much. The audit would encompass questions of environmental desirability, sustainability and especially aesthetics because these are the main psychological axes of economics. It would explore the limits on wealth that the community seeks to establish and enquire into obvious disparities and anomalies in income–for example, why carers are so badly paid. The National Emotional Audit would research the impact on psychological health of living in an economically polarised society–for the rich, the poor and those with middle incomes. The audit's task would include the monitoring of vocational retraining programmes conducted by the government or other bodies to make sure that these are not too instrumental or mechanical but adopt a wider and more humane attitude to 'education'. The membership of the audit would include psychotherapists, health professionals and educators, people from religious backgrounds and artists–as well as economists and social scientists with a range of points of view.

Now, as I was hinting earlier, a new approach to spirituality is required for transformative politics to reach its potential. This includes understanding spirituality as an expression of a profoundly democratic commitment to equality–equality in the eyes of God being translated into equality in society. Craft spirituality understands that there is no need to relegate the world of work and the processes of manufacture to a non-spiritual or anti-spiritual box. Human beings have a genius for being artificial; it is their defining characteristic and not a moral failing. Spirituality has its profane dimension as well, and transformative politics engenders an approach to spirituality that can see in it what seem like psychopathology and immaturity. But the syndromes and symptoms of psychotherapy and psychiatry do not cause their possessors to be cast out of the spiritual lifeboat. The stone that the builder rejected ...

Let's play with the idea of an Emotional and Spiritual Justice Commission (the ESJC) that would monitor the effects on psychological and spiritual health of all policy proposals. We know that policy decisions affect people's self-esteem and self-respect and regulate how easy or difficult it is to establish links with other people. Arrangements could be made to allow anyone who wanted to tell the story of how his or her private space has been affected by public policy to communicate with the Commission. Adherents of the various formal religions would obviously sit on it alongside health professionals, psychotherapists and members of the general public.

I recognise fully that the depth perspectives I have been advocating this afternoon may never be applied ever to our political culture. Everything I have said may fail to make one iota of difference to the condition of the world. So I will end with a few words of Samuel Beckett, who lived and worked as closely as anyone with the need to go on in the face of not being able to go on: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better".

(Based on Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life (London: Profile Books; New York: Other Press/Karnac US, 2001, pp. 224.) © Andrew Samuels 2000. All Rights Reserved.)

Politics on the Couch is available at a special mail order price including post & packing of £9-99 (UK), £10-99 (other Europe), £11-99 (rest of the world excluding US and Canada). For US and Canada see below. The bookshop price is £10-99.

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Press Release

Politics on the Couch
Citizenship and the Internal Life
Andrew Samuels
Other Press/Karnac Books
March 12, 2001
$16 Paperback Original Amazon: ISBN 1892746832

Politics in the Western world has broken down - where will new approaches come from? Andrew Samuels' extraordinary new book argues that psychotherapy can contribute to a transformation of politics and generate a sense of meaning not only inprivate but also in public life. It explores the ways in which merely living in a badly organized and unjust economic system affects people's mental health and internal sense of well-being, even if their own material situation is not too bad. It also addresses the dangers of searching for heroic leaders, the need to accept the inevitability of disappointment, and the possibility of forming a new kind of relationship between the citizen and the state - one that will release the "political energies" of individuals who have withdrawn into their private worlds out of disgust with the political system as it stands. Many will find Samuels' proposals provocative, or even outrageous - until they recall where the conventional thinking of our politicians has led us.

EARLY PRAISE FOR POLITICS ON THE COUCH

'An important contribution to thinking about politics...moving, insightful and optimistic...' Former US Senator Bill Bradley

'Wonderfully subversive, hugely ambitious bid to recast political debate...profoundlyoptimistic...Describes how you put the emotional and spiritual into politics, and the political back into the private.' Lead editorial, The Guardian (England)

'Of absolutely direct interest to everyone, not just psychotherapists...His fresh thinking is a delight to read...this really is a "must read" book.' Self and Society (England)

'This highly original book refreshes our thinking on the meaning and possibilities in political life...and gives us potent ways to get out of the current malaise.' Susie Orbach author of Fat is a Feminist Issueand The Impossibility of Sex.

An acknowledged innovator in the fields of psychotherapy and psychology, Andrew Samuels has also worked as a consultant to politicians, political organisations, and activist groups in the US, Britain, Europe, Brazil, Israel, Japan, Russia and South Africa. Internationally known as an inspiring speaker, Samuels is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and Professor of Psychoanalytic Studies at London University, as well as a psychotherapist in private practice. His previous books, which have been translated into nineteen languages, include The Father and The Political Psyche.

Other Press/Karnac Books, 224 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011.

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