How can we translate our emotional, bodily and imaginative responses to Bosnia. to ecological disaster, to homeless-ness. to poverty worldwide. into action? How can we begin to make political use of people's private reactions to public events?
This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of 'countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways.
Political energy is not the same as political power. Political energy means bringing imaginative creativity to bear on seemingly intractable problems, trying to solve them in ways that reflect concern for social Justice.
Recent months have seen a huge moral panic whipped up about lone parenthood. The state of fatherhood is both more and less than the level of that huge and passionate debate implies. Scanning the situation with a psychologist's eye, it occurs to me that we are witnessing a damaging and misleading idealization of fathers and the roles which men play in families.
Therapists and analysts are taught in their training to be wary of anyone who seems too settled and sure in their gender identity and gender role. The tycoon who seems so capable and dynamic, such a marvelous self-starter, issecretly, in his unconsciousa sobbing, little boy, dependent on others, maybe mainly female, for all his feelings of safeness and security.
