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Psychiatrists Sebastian Kraemer and Jane Roberts are the editors of a new anthology that seeks to engage psychologically and politically minded people in a common dialogue about social issues. Such a call for dialogue is certainly not unprecedented. Readers of The Politics of Attachment may be reminded, for example, of the controversy in recent years over what Michael Lerner, of Tikkun magazine, has called a “politics of meaning.” The idea, which enjoyed a brief publicity in the United States and even came to be identified with Hillary Rodham Clinton (although she repudiated the connection), was belittled by liberals, free market conservatives, and ironists of all persuasions. The editors of this volume perhaps fear the same reception; they note in their introduction, in what can only be seen as a preemptive response to imagined critics, that the “book is not an appeal to sentiment” (p. 5).
The book is not an appeal to sentiment, although it will almost certainly be received that way by those, particularly in the discipline of political science, who scorn psychological modes of interpretation. After all, political scientists do not generally see “people”—women, men, and children, especially women and