Books received

SINGER, THOMAS (ED). The Vision Thing: Myth, Politics and Psyche in the World. London & New York:  Routledge, 2000. Pp.  xvii + 267. Pbk. £17.99.

This collaborative work brings together a formidable range of writers from within both the political and the post-Jungian world. The basic assumption of the book, as described by its editor Thomas Singer, is that there are ‘deep highly charged, unexplored relationships between mythological or archetypal reality, psychological reality, and political reality’.

The structure of the book seeks concretely to underpin the three levels of the basic assumption: the first part of the book explores the relationship between ‘mythic vision and political reality’. Samuels's papers on the ‘Good enough leader’ and ‘The politics of transformation: the transformation of politics’ open up a way of thinking about the relations between the collective and the individual through their location within the political. Through this discourse we can begin to explore the points of linkage between psychological development as part and parcel of political development and vice versa.

The second part of the book talks about the archetypal linkage between ‘the one and the many’. Diversity and integration form the basis of the papers in this section. Hinton's paper entitled ‘Under the shade of Pol Pot's umbrella: mandala, myth, and politics in the Cambodian genocide’ is a beautiful analysis of the mechanisms involved in the dissemination of political propaganda through what Hinton calls the ‘Mandala Principle’ which emerges through socio-political relations.

I found all of the papers compelling and highly recommend this book.

SHALIT, EREL. The Hero and his Shadow. Psychopolitical aspects of Myth and Reality in Israel.  University Press of America, 1999. Pp.  xiv + 154. Hbk. $38.00.

This powerfully written book brings together the political and the psychological. Focusing on the development of Israel in myth and reality, the author weaves an inte