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.
Gottfried Heuer, the editor of this ‘plural bouquet for a birthday celebration in print’ (p. 1), places Andrew Samuels, as the recipient of the bouquet, in the company of two well-known names in psychoanalysis. Otto Gross and Wilhelm Reich were both pioneers and rebels in the early history of analysis. However, their attempts to introduce radical political ideas into a movement that at the time only valued loyalty and conformity met with harsh rejection from which neither recovered (Roazen 1974).
It is difficult to place the contributions of Andrew Samuels in the same context as Gross and Reich. His best-known books, Jung and the Post-Jungians , The Political Psyche , and Politics on the Couch (2001), were published in an era when the boundaries between various schools of analysis were beginning to get blurred. When Samuels published the first of his books it had also become acceptable to review critically the ideas of both Freud and Jung and to examine their personal lives with a fuller range of available documentation. Instead of being regarded as a pariah of the profession, as happened with Gross and Reich, Samuels has an impressive resume of accomplishments and acknowledgements.
What this Festschrift reminds us of, apart from the undeniable status of its recipient, is in fact how far analytic ideas have travelled and in such a multitude of directions: from exploring attitudes towards religion and family systems to new research in science and politics, there are now many topics that are open to analytic explorations. Samuels’ topic is politics and his own politics, although never explicitly stated, are probably a bit left of centre.
The birthday bouquet consists of 40 contributions from different analysts, scholars, researchers and writers. They all give testimony to how Samuels in his career has taken great pride in building bridges and worked towards integrating the often competing strands of analysis. Many of the contributors are Jungian colleagues who describe t