The mirror and the hammer: depth psychology and political transformation

The paper is about the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on processes of political change. It is a contribution to the longstanding ambition of depth psychology to develop a form of political and cultural analysis that will, in Freud's words, ‘understand the riddles of the world’. It has to be admitted that there is an equally longstanding reluctance in the non-psychological community to accept the many and varied ideas and suggestions concerning political matters that have been offered by analysts of all persuasions. I do not believe this can all be put down to resistance. There is something offensive above reductive interpretations of complex socio-political problems in exclusively psychological terms. The tendency to panpsychism on the part of some depth psychologists has led me to wonder if an adequate methodology and ethos actually exists with which to make an engagement of depth psychology with the public sphere possible.

By ‘politics’ I mean the arrangements within a culture for the organization and distribution of power, especially economic power, and the way in which power is deployed to maintain the survival