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This is a time when so many of us who read the British Journal of Psychotherapy are aware that the organisational foundations upon which we have based our working lives and our personal lives are shifting almost daily. Social work, education, the NHS
are changing from diversely evolving systems of varying kinds of professionalism into organisations with an over-emphasis on the language and ethos of one system, financial management. In learning this new language for our work, we try at the same time to preserve and develop the ideas which have underpinned our various skilled applications. Whether we like it or not, we must all become ‘political’ and play a part in ensuring that the knowledge bases of our various professions continue to be usefully employed. Otherwise there is a real danger that our particular wheel will be harnessed to a runaway cash register.
Into this confusing situation Andrew Samuels makes a bold foray, addressing a varied audience from the very specialised psychotherapist to the general public. He is a Jungian analyst, well known as a lecturer and public speaker as well as a writer. He writes as he speaks - his voice rings out of the pages, confidently asserting that new ways must be found for psychotherapists to understand as well as to influence the socio-political spheres in Western culture. I quote (p.75):
I want to suggest that, rather than looking for psychopathology in culture, which is so easy to find, we try to look with psychopathology, with a psychopathological eye. We should not only search for hidden depression in the culture, or for paranoid projections between nation states, or for the sado-masochistic patterns in pornography. Rather let us see how our own depression makes us regard things in a certain way, through a lens preoccupied with our own destructiveness. Let us see how an envious eye makes us see envy everywhere, making us accept that what is good in modern culture can be rubbished by a weary intelligentsia…. (We should)