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This is an intensely - at at times, densely - argued plea for an affective subjective engagement with our social and political milieu: an engagement of the citizen with society that Samuels sees foreshadowed, articulated, and validated in our clinical experience within, and theoretical explorations of, countertransference. This is the hard-won body of analytic knowledge - this capacity to feel and discern through the countertransference, and to trust these promptings - that is the professional ‘jewel’ that Samuels challenges us to burnish bright and put to work in other contexts: out of the ivory tower and onto the streets!
He argues thus: we are often hamstrung by anxieties about using the subjective factor in political or social debate: why should we assume that outer world issues do not communicate with our unconscious, cannot be illumined, and indeed analysed, by what we make of our unconscious reactions? Let us be open, and bold: and Samuels certainly is; let me quote his first example: ‘I was on the tube. It was crowded and hot. I had a sudden fantasy of staying with the people who were in the carriage all day. We could go to lunch as a group and become friends. I really felt in love! I wanted to embrace everyone. I had an erection.’ Now Samuels seems to be arguing against any reading of this dramatic countertransference in its own right (i.e. without memory, hope, or desire, if you like), instead favouring an explicit linking of his bodily reactions and fantasies with the social issue of transport; concluding, with uncharacteristic blandness, that he is experiencing the counterpulls of movement and stasis. I wonder; his vignette, in its vivid simplicity, struck me as a poignant expression of that yearning to identify with the all-satisfying breast-penis that circumstances of oppressive dehumanizing (such as crowded tubes or authoritarian regimes) can invoke. A lovely example of enantiodromia, and one that is deeply political in the sense that it draws on th