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Andrew Samuels is a Jungian analyst from London who has made it his task to relate Analytical Psychology to a variety of topics of post-modern concern. In this book he aims to engage his fellow analysts with the world beyond their consulting rooms. This is a healthy corrective for a profession that has mostly concerned itself with the private world of inner experience and so joins recent works by James Hillman and Theodore Roszak in an attempt to formulate a therapy for culture, society, and ultimately, the planet. Its aim is not so much to advocate social activism as to lobby for a shift in attitude. Recalling the Greek experience, he reminds us that one of the primary functions of the polis was to provide a locale for the enactment of cultural activity. This involved the invocation of various deities whose individual contributions to the survival of the city's well-being required recognition. The scientific and capitalistic revolutions obliterated much of this sensibility but the deeper craving for such experience lives on. “We can see the culture's attempts to resacralize itself in its extreme openness to numinous experience … including the ritually pagan: Sexual experimentation, rock music, sports, food, fashion, money, collectible things” (p. 19).
This resacralization involves a process of re-imagining our world, which means relating to and through the archetypal images that populate the world around us. Samuels identifies the “Trickster” as the operative archetype in politics today: deal-making, opportunistic, and competing. “The Trickster” also animates Machiavelli's classic handbook on how a political leader can prolong his often mercurial career. Hermes was the principal “Trickster” figure of the Greek pantheon: god of boundaries, markets, and thieves. All of these figured in the Gulf War scenario during which, Samuels notes, there were frequent “Trickster” images associated with Saddam Hussein (psychohistorian Lloyd de Mause noted other patterns in his fant