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This brilliant retrospective collection goes back nearly 20 years and includes all the subjects that became the hallmark of Andrew Samuels's work: family and gender in the twenty-first century, the boundary between the political and the psychological, the social role of the therapist, the question of morality in a pluralist society, politics and rebellion, the psychology of the capitalist system, and the vexed question of Jung's anti-Semitism.
All these disparate themes in Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics are united by the concern for the individual in today's globalized, fluid world in which identities are more fragmented than ever, and the weakened community structures and family ties are no longer capable of providing human beings with the emotional support and dependable ‘rules for living’. So today's individuation is a tricky affair and is very different from what it used to be even in Jung's time. Individual freedom comes with a price, and this price is choice - availability of options, opinions, moralities, and ways of living.
This choice, this a-systemic, tricksterish plurality can be experienced as either exciting and liberating or depressing and even tragic. The constant need to make a moral choice calls for a capacity which Samuels calls ‘moral imagination’ (as