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Andrew Samuels has long been one of the rare figures able to move fluently between analytic consulting room, political arena, and the public square. His new book, Reflecting Critically on the Political Psyche: Therapy, Testament and Trouble in Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis (Routledge, ), consolidates that vocation with a collection that is at once programmatic, retrospective, and provocatively future-oriented. Arranged in five parts—Culture, Politics, Therapy, Jungian, Clinic—the volume reads like a summation of several decades of work on what Samuels calls the “political psyche”, while also offering fresh arguments about training, pluralism, social justice, and the ethical demands of contemporary practice. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief retrospective note and many include experiential exercises, an unusual and welcome feature that invites readers to test claims against their own clinical and political experience.
The opening section on culture sets the tone. Samuels begins (characteristically) by staging encounter and conflict rather than seeking premature reconciliation. An early essay revisits the liberal idealization of “the Other”, urging clinicians and citizens alike to interrogate the moral satisfactions that sometimes substitute for contact and responsibility. Elsewhere in the section, he takes up politically engaged art—appreciating its capacity to galvanize but warning against the therapist's temptation to smuggle aesthetic identification into the consulting room as if it were clinical insight. The chapter on age and individuation, with its tart subtitle about “the delusion of maturity”, works as a miniature of the book's wider method: Samuels punctures cherished self-descriptions in order to clear space for an ethics of uncertainty, one in which individuation cannot be quietly equated with seniority, status, or gravitas.