You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Andrew Samuels begins this paper by clearly setting out his theme that ‘as yet a psychologically sensitive political discourse has not formed, though many people, myself included, are struggling to create such a discourse’. He defines his use of the word ‘politics’ as referring to ‘the concerted arrangements and struggles within an institution, or in a single society … for the organization and distribution of power’. In developing his theme he challenges the boundaries that are conventionally accepted as existing ‘between the external world and the internal world, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between the political … and the psychological development of the person’ and asks ‘can the clinical also be political?’
The author contends that depth psychology can fill a crucial role in relation to political change at the point of intersection between the public and the private, the political and the personal. Consequently the experience of clinical analysis and therapy can contribute to the formation of a new attitude towards politics. It therefore follows that the analytic countertransference can be used outside the consulting-room to become an organ of informed political criticism, in other words ‘countertransference can be politicized’. He puts ‘the experiencing citizen in the therapist's place'. In support of his proposals he refers to his international survey, which included practitioners, the results of which implied that many analysts respond to external political events in the consulting-room.
As we have come to expect from papers by this writer he sets our thoughts on a new course which leads to several channels of speculation. He cites the reaction to the Los Angeles riots as fertile ground for his thesis. One is left wondering how his proposals could be applied to other phenomena, often focused on by the media with reference to social change, for example the apparent escalation of physical abuse. Once the boundary between the internal