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For some of us, the New Left/Hippie politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s was what initially interested us in analysis. Whether it was Marcuse and Brown, who called for an end to repression, or Laing, who called for a politics of experience, it was the prospects for a political depth psychology that inspired us. We read Freud and Bullitt on Woodrow Wilson, Reich on the mass psychology of fascism, Fromm on the fear of freedom, Lasswell on psychopathology and politics, Lifton on nuclear war and totalitarianism, and Habermas on psychoanalysis and critical theory. Jungians were conspicuously absent from the reading list.
Now Andrew Samuels suddenly appears to rectify the situation. It is as if he presents himself as the very incarnation of the principle of compensation. If Jungians have tended to ignore, neglect, or even repress the political dimension of depth psychology, Samuels would compensate that omission.
Politics now means something more and something different from what it meant twenty-five years ago. It includes issues of gender, ethnicity, and ecology in a way that it previously did not. The women's and men's movements, gay and lesbian issues, multiculturalism, and environmentalism have radically redefined what is political. In The Political Psyche, Samuels has many original things to say about all of these topics.
A number of Jungians have recently become more politically active. Hillman has called for a depth psychology that would attend to the soul of the world. Bosnak has organized international conferences on the theme of apocalypse — on nuclear war, charisma and holy war, the environment, and the millennium — and he has written a beautiful book on the dreams of an AIDS patient. It is in this context that The Political Psyche is best appreciated, as a major contribution to what is now a trend.
The Political Psyche represents the continuation, elaboration, and culmination of certain themes that first articulated in The Plural Psyche ( Routledge, 1