Letters

To the Editor:

It was with dismay that I read the dismissive review of Andrew Samuels's The Political Psyche (Psychoanalytic Books, 6, 570-575). This is an original, provocative, and intelligent book that has a twofold purpose: to take the psyche out of the consulting room and to bring politics into the consulting room.

Samuels does not agree with analysts like Greenson who suggests in The Technique and Practice of Psychoanalysis that any talk on the part of patients about “external events—even events of great political magnitude” is probably a form of resistance. Nor does he agree with Greenson that it is “striking how rarely patients do talk of political events” (p. 64). The international survey that Samuels conducted demonstrates that patients do talk about political events and that many contemporary analysts do regard such talk merely as a defensive evasion of the “real” issues. Similarly, Samuels does not agree with analysts like Greenacre who argues in Emotional Growth that the preservation of an inviolate transference field requires “the sacrifice on the part of the analyst of conspicuous public participation even in very worthy social and political ‘causes’ to which he may lend his name or his activities” (vol. 2, p. 638).

Samuels is the foremost Jungian analyst in Britain. He is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex, a position comparable to the Freud professorship that Joseph Sandler holds at the University of London. He has written three books (Jungians and Post-Jungians, The Plural Psyche, and The Political Psyche), has edited two others on the father and on psychopathology, and has co-written a dictionary of Jungian terminology. He is widely respected by analysts of different theoretical persuasions—Jungians, Freudians, Kleinians, and Lacanians.

Samuels is one of the most politically active of contemporary Jungian analysts. He serves as a consultant to several political parties