Lapis Magazine

Can Citizens be Therapists of Today’s World? Parts 1 and 2 by Andrew Samuels

A Jungian analyst and political consultant examines which elements in the contemporary world have come unexpectedly to serve as our therapist.

Andrew Samuels is acknowledged internationally as an innovator in the application of “therapy thinking” to politics. He is Professor of Analytical Psychology at the University of Essex and a Jungian Analyst in private practice in London. He is the founder of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility and of Jews for Justice for Palestinians, and a leading member of the UK Stop the War Coalition. His most recent book was the award-winning Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life, described by Bill Bradley as “an important contribution to thinking about politics … moving, insightful and optimistic.”

Both Part One and Part Two are lightly edited versions of a talk given recently at the New York Open Center.

Part One

I’m a psychotherapist and a writer but the work I’m most proud of, in some ways, is really the foundation of what I’m going to be saying this evening. The work I want to talk about is really based on what I’ve done as a political consultant working with some quite senior mainstream politicians at home in the UK, and with people here like Bill Bradley. But increasingly as I return to my 60’s student political roots I’m working with activist groups and with less official political formations.

Out of my clinical work and the work I’ve just described as a consultant, I’ve fashioned a kind-of hybrid approach to psychology, especially the kind of psychology that analysts and therapists use in politics. Although I’m an enthusiast for the ways in which therapy thinking can be used in politics, I’m also extremely critical and skeptical about it as well because I think there’s a tremendous risk that therapists will end up becoming reductionist experts on politics so that they will want to analyze the political in terms of their pre-existing psychological theories, whether it’s in context, whether it’s projection, whether it’s the archetypes.

The world, perhaps for very good reason, has not shown up for the session. In a way, the therapists have started without the world so we have a huge debate going on in the psychotherapy community about every single aspect of the political life of nations but the nations are really not interested. One of the things that I try to do is to increase the chances of a dialogue between therapists with an interest in politics, and political people who maybe don’t have much of an interest in therapy.

I’m going to begin by giving a fairly ordinary talk with some fairly unordinary ideas in it. I want to discuss some ideas with you, which are troubling. They really are rather questioning ideas. They’re not settled. They’re not firmly laid. They’re not solutions to anything. Questions like this: does the West need therapy? If so, who could be the West’s therapist? And what are the problems for which the West might need therapy?

I’ll list a number of problems and one I’ll settle on and focus on eventually is the whole question of our aggression — how we manage it or fail to manage it in Western societies and the difficulties we’re having with aggression in the world today. Then I’ll move on from talking about aggression to talk about leadership, and I have some ideas to share with you about what I call the good-enough leader. So let’s get right into this. Is there something in the West today that requires therapy? Obviously, the way I ask that question indicates that I think the answer is yes. And I’m going to suggest to you that the West has found its therapist although we don’t like it. The therapist the we, in the West, have found is Islam.

The signs of our crisis in the West are obvious ? our excessive materialism, our global greed, and the massive social and economic inequality that we seem wedded to, the existence of staggering rates of crime and violence in many, if not all Western societies, all the addictions that we know of including the whole phenomenon of sexual excess, which many Islamic critics have spoken about: pornography, prostitution, trafficking, and the general decline in the seriousness of long term relationships and marriage. These are symptoms.

So too, is the way in which we try to construct a spirit-free politics as if values and ideas don’t matter and only the bottom-line end results do matter. We also have the apathy of our citizens and the way in which idealism is going into hibernation. These are symptoms all of which have been pointed out with varying degrees of sympathy, it must be said, by Islamic critics, whether these are so-called moderate Islamicists or so-called extreme Islamicists. It’s very hard to listen, not only to what Islamic critics of the West say, but I suspect it’s also very hard to sit there and listen to me say that our therapist is Islam. But, who said being in therapy is easy?

I want to hit home for necessity for the West to listen and to hear. So what I’m doing is I’m positioning Islam not only as the enemy of the West, not only as the critic of the West, but also as it’s therapist. These terms the West and Islam are, of course, as problematic as the term therapist. But you’ll stay with me I’m sure for a few more minutes before the critical faculties kick in and you’re outraged at this idea.

Now, I’m not idealizing Islam. Islam, as we know and as Islam knows, breeds its own injustices and its cruel fundamentalisms and perhaps this comes with dependence on a book. Let’s remember how many groups depend on a book — the Bible, or the Koran, Freud or Jung. Dependence on a book is often not a good thing. Dependence on a book coupled with possession of power and military technology, in particular, is a disaster, no matter whether the book is an American book or an Al-Qaeda book. You don’t have to be 100% fog-free, or possess perfect insight, or to have sorted out all of your problems to be somebody’s therapist. Nonetheless, the fact that Islam is very flawed doesn’t mean that it can’t function, whether we like it or not, as our therapist.

Let’s take the idea of the West needing therapy a little bit further. What are the particular cultural habits of mind that represent the symptoms of this client, the West? In general terms, I’m thinking about one-sidedness. The way we lack balance, wholeness, and integration, and there is a crisis around those things. But crisis is often the catalyst for healing. I think the ingredients for some kind of healing are there. The crisis is there and the therapist is there. Nobody really likes their therapist and nobody really likes to admit that they need therapy. Therapy isn’t a joy ride; it’s hard work.

Let’s look at some of the symptomatic features of the West that I think call out for therapy.

There is a crisis in our thinking; I’m referring to our binary ways of thinking in pairs of complementary opposites. It goes something like this: if we are rational people, they are irrational; if we are compassionate they are cruel, and so on. Its this kind of binary thinking which is very difficult to get beyond but I don’t pretend to have solved it personally. That makes it very hard to spread a general critique over all the warring players in any conflict ridden situation, for example the Middle East, and equally makes it very hard to spread a general compassion over them as well.

And here’s another symptom of Western habits of mind that seems to me to call for therapy — it’s a crisis in morality. There is a problem with what I call original morality. By original morality I mean the very primitive, inborn, so-called archetypal moral sensibility with which everybody arrives on this earth. Its inborn so its very precious but its very clumsy and very rigid. And I think its very characteristic of the way in which people think in the West, and how it works when there is a dispute or a conflict. The horizontal argument is flicked in a kind of moral gymnastics or moral sleight of hand into a vertical communication — a vertical dimension comes in. So instead of two people slugging it out where at least in principle each side has an equal side of dominating, we go for a vertical, lower to higher, or higher to lower style of relating, in which it’s not possible for there to be a true dialogue. It’s a moral problem — it’s actually technically an abuse of morality. And you see it in political discourse and the way the media addresses current affairs all the time. There is vertical replacement of ordinary horizontal communication.

Now the thing about this verticality — this original morality especially when it comes to politics is that it is extremely pleasurable to operate this, especially when you get the upper position, in fact its quite addictive. And people will do almost anything alongside their ruthlessness and desire to be effective in politics to keep that morally superior position. You see this most dramatically these days in relation to terrorism, which in the West receives a blanket moral condemnation. Its almost impossible, it would appear, to look at terrorism in a horizontal way, where something is being done by one warring group against another warring group that it feels itself to be at war with. Instead terrorism, understandably you might say, especially in this city, especially in our times, is looked at in a vertical way, from a morally higher position down to a less moral or non-moral lower position. This causes us to forget for example that there are many different kinds of terrorism.

What about the The African National Congress? Had the ANC not started to blow up power stations there is no doubt whatsoever that Mandela may have died on Robbens Island. Or Israel in 1947/1948 — something conveniently forgotten by Israelis and their allies in this country and in Europe. As we know, it was only really the change in legal status of the people who perpetrated the terrorism of 47/48 that avoided these people being pilloried and perhaps prosecuted for their terrible crimes. Or, speaking as a Brit, many people in the United Kingdom who were terrified of being blown up by the IRA, who were hostile to the use of violence to settle politics, had to accept that the IRA’s argument had some substance to it.

So we know all this, but that’s not what actually happens in our engagement with the problem of terrorism today. It’s very difficult to accept because it feels so terribly foreign and requires so much moral imagination that terrorists are convinced that they are engaged in a form of what I call social spirituality. This is not just to reprise the old arguments about martyrdom; it’s to make a much more serious point. Terrorists mostly believe that what they are doing is a kind of spiritually dynamic act, whether we like it or not. Now what’s happened in our pleasure in beating up the terrorists is that we’ve lost the capacity to see why they do it. And I think that in order to regain that capacity we have first to question the typical habit of mind that goes with this original morality, with the immense, almost orgasmic pleasure of morally beating up on the other.

So the first crisis is one in thinking, the second is a crisis in morality, and the third, it seems to me, is a crisis in sincerity and authenticity for us in the West. Aren’t we supposed to love our neighbors here? I’ve even heard rumor that we are inclined or supposed to love our enemies. These are the hearts of Judaism and Christianity, yet we have managed to create in spite of that philosophy, one of the most unjust and unfair socio-economic systems the world has ever seen. And we’ve closed our eyes to the links between social and economic disempowerment and terrorism. We ignore what I call democratic spirituality — sometimes called these days deep equality. You know the term deep ecology. Now there is deep equality. But we are so insincere, so inauthentic and so hypocritical that we ignore the presence of ideas about these things in our culture. People say when we talk about deep equality or democratic spirituality, they are too idealistic as if somehow these are foreign importations into western cultural discourse. Western cultural discourse invented these ideas. These are not foreign intruders, these are not venomous, poisonous snakes coming in to get us in the West, these are our cultural inventions.

So I hope you can see it really isn’t such a crazy idea to suggest that in the West we have the kinds of problems, the kinds of one-sidenesses, the kinds of lack of balance, the kinds of perverted ways of thinking that usually are regarded as requiring therapy. I don’t think its such a big step beyond that to say that the most coherent and sustained critique of life in the West today does not come from people who are against global capitalism, although that is a very coherent and ever more important critique. It does not come from the faith communities that come out of Christianity in particular. It does not come from the environmental and ecological movements. The most interesting source about ideas of who we are and what is wrong with us in the West today is coming from Islam. No wonder we want to annihilate it, just as it’s no wonder when your therapist got the lowdown on you, you wanted to annihilate him or her.

Part Two

There is a huge debate in psychology about the standing of aggression and about what it is. Roughly speaking, the debate is about whether it’s a primary thing or a secondary thing. Is aggression just something a human being is born with in copious quantities — part of their hard-wiring, their bio-chemistry, their neurophysiology and the like, so that the kinds of behaviors that we associate with aggression are an inevitability. Or is aggression more of a secondary phenomenon, something that results from frustration, from people living in less than optimum surroundings and who are therefore forced to act in a destructively and violently aggressive way because their true and better natures are somehow frustrated.

This debate is, of course, the most central debate in connection with human nature. In psychoanalysis there is a whole body of thinking around the death drive. Also in psychoanalysis you have theories like Winnicott’s. He argued stringently that human babies aren’t born aggressive. They may become it, they may need to be it. But to conceive of the infant or the baby as primarily or very largely a mass of aggressive impulses is a big mistake.pan>

So we have this debate about human nature, and what does a therapy thinker like myself have to say? What I have to say is actually the hardest sell of all because you get rich and you sell books if you say its all about hard-wiring, its all inheritance, its all to do with the archetypes and so on. The problem with human nature is that it’s both nasty, brutal, competitive, self-interested, inquisitive, murderous, sadistic and benevolent; and co-operative, collaborative, altruistic, loving and related. This is the hardest thing to get over, for example if you are advising, as I have done, politicians on economic policies and logical parameters of economic policy. Some psychologists will say they will tolerate nothing – they are only interested in self-improvement, gain and the like. Other psychologists will say no, human beings if approached in the right way are wonderfully altruistic. People like me will unfortunately say they are both — no matter how much altruism there is, no matter how much good will there is, no matter how much idealism there is, there is what Jung calls “the shadow” to consider in all of us. That part of us we wouldn’t like to admit to in public, the bit we have no wish to be and yet we are.

One of the things I do is to actually bring in the question of the “shadow” because, in spite of all the good will and all the good intentions that exist in the world today around economics, if there wasn’t some sort of commitment to inequality, then we would have solved it. We would have solved the problem of an unfair, unjust distribution of wealth. We don’t want to. So there is the shadow always, no matter how altruistic and idealistic somebody is.

The problem with aggression is not that is exists, but that it gets stuck. The problem is that people repeat again and again their patterns of aggressivity and it goes stale — the way food left out of a refrigerator goes stale. There is nothing wrong with aggression in many ways. The problem is people get stuck, institutions get stuck and nations get stuck, and I want to suggest to you a little bit about how one might free up aggression so that an individual, an institution or even a country or a society can play through a different set of styles of aggression, and not be stuck all the time on the same one.

I want to tell you something about gender aggression and depression. Depression comes about when a person imagines they have destroyed somebody else, especially somebody that they love. That’s why you get so much depression when there is bereavement. There is an idea in somebody’s mind that they are responsible, bizarre and untrue though it is on a factual level, they are responsible for the death of a loved one. They criticize themselves, they feel guilty, they reproach themselves and they go into a kind of decline which is actually what depression is all about. It’s to do with unmanageable depressive anxiety.

Now this means there is a level where this kind of depression is always untrue, because except in situations where somebody really has killed somebody, which are statistically insignificant, people are not responsible for the death of their husband, their wife, their mother, their father. They only imagine that they are. A little inner voice says, “You are so bad, you are so destructive, you are such a threat, it’s you that did it.” Now in women, that inner voice is louder than in men so a woman is more likely to say, ” I’m responsible for the damage, the destruction or the death of the other.” A woman is more likely to get depressed and women do get more depressed than men as we know. This is why.

Their evaluation of aggression is even more stringent than that which is applied to males, and this is a terrifically problematic conundrum. The relevance for this talk is that when it comes to aggression, you cannot evaluate it in a context free way. The whole situation needs to be taken into account and this is where our political thinking post and indeed pre-9/11 has been so deficient. We have been unable to understand why there has been so much aggressivity and destructiveness in the world, and I think if one remembers the different stories around aggression that males and females tell themselves, then one can start to see not only is it necessary but also possible to evaluate aggression in the world in a very different and differentiated kind of way.

Let me review of where I’ve got to. I’ve basically been saying that there are these problems in our ways of thinking in the West, to do with complementary opposites, and with a lack of sincerity about our so-called values. And then I refined this down to a set of reflections about aggression which come to a very great extent from social psychology and psychotherapy thinking.

I’ve taken you all the way through the crisis in the West, the moral crises, the sincerity crisis, the thinking crisis, and talked about aggression, I’ve put a lot of ideas forward about Islam and now I want to talk about leadership.

The phrase ” good enough” is a buzz phrase in psychotherapy circles that I wish I could really sell to the politicians. Actually I wish I could sell it to the citizens too. The phrase was the invention of a British psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott who worked a lot with children as a pediatrician, and he talked about the “good enough” mother. Winnicott was trying to understand how a baby primarily, but also the baby’s caretakers, could cope with the fact that it is not possible to deliver perfect service at all times and in all respects to a new baby. A new baby may have a desire or even an expectation to be met, to be given everything that could be conceivably desired. What Winnicott was asking us to think about is an extraordinarily profound issue: how do you cope with a less than perfect world? How do you cope with your disappointments at the way that the world has failed you? How do you handle failure?

Winnicott’s idea was to posit a middle way between the baby idealizing and almost worshipping a caregiver who gives everything, and a baby denigrating and attacking a caregiver who gives absolutely nothing. He asked what if the caregiver is good enough? – not perfect so you idealize her, not terrible so you can’t stand him or her, but good enough. Please note what he stressed is very much about failure. Winnicott has a wonderful one-liner. He says, “the parent must fail the baby but in the baby’s own way.” Now just replace the words: ” A leader has to fail the citizen, but in the citizens’ own way.” The citizen is faced with a problem of steering a middle way between our idealization of leaders (we call this fascism or dictatorship), or denigrating leaders as in the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Clinton “No One Left To Lie To.”

So there is a kind of illumination of the problem of leadership in the world today from this material about “good enough parents,” but I don’t want to say that the leader is a parent or the citizen is a baby. What I want to do is invite just to think about the notion of good enoughness as being all to do with failure.

Now I’m going to take you on a negative journey in the heart of the political process. Politics is all about dimensions of failure. Everyone involved in politics, be it as an official an activist or a commentator, knows that nothing succeeds in the way it’s supposed to. There are always new risks that come on stream in most unexpected way and the future defies being fixed. Yet the number of Western politicians who have said, “We will fail to achieve what it is that we want to achieve” is absolutely zero. It’s the big lie at the heart of the Western political process. Why? It’s because politicians are caught up in this idealization/denigration dynamic. Either they are going to be everything to us and we are going to be in slavish admiration of them, or they are going to be nothing to us and we’re going to bring them down and impeach them, either literally or metaphorically. Good enough leaders, good enough politicians seem very, very difficult to find. Why? Because we are in love with heroic hyper-male leaders, even those of us who criticize such leaders are turned on to our very depths by them.

We are experiencing a very interesting head/gut split. Most people know with their heads that following the hyper-male heroic leader of whatever sex (we mustn’t forget Mrs. Thatcher) regularly leads the society involved into difficulties. Bertholdt Brecht had Galileo say, “Unhappy is the man that hath need of heroes,” and it’s a very interesting thought. Although our head tells us these things, our political guts tell us a completely different story.

Now I regularly go to the Labour Party conference and I put this to them and they think I’m a little mad. And they say things like, “It’s so refreshing to hear someone say that politics is about failure, because we are completely hooked on the idea that politics is about success.” Or they’ll say, “How interesting it is to hear somebody say that the best leaders may not be ones who actually lead,” when in fact the worst thing you can say about a senior politician in Britain is that he or she can’t lead, or is a weak leader. In fact I once gave a talk called “In Praise of Weak Leaders” because one of the things weak leaders do is leave space for citizens to take their leadership places as well. The difficulty with our desire for a strong leader is that we write ourselves out of the leadership check. We give it to somebody else to do, and we then become less than good enough citizens.

So there is a great deal at stake here. Bob Dylan’s got that great line “There’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all.” Samuel Beckett was on to this as well with that famous line, “No matter, try again, fail again, fail better.” Therapists know about this because the problems we deal with, either with the individual or across our whole practices, are absolutely incorrigible. They don’t go away and they never will. So failure is a very interesting idea with which to view the political world and its very cutting edge, its absolutely cutting edge. I’ve been on the radio in Britain and I suggested we should have a National Failure Enquiry. I managed to diffuse the madness of this by saying that I thought it would be in permanent session.

One of my proudest moments was influencing the Labour government to explore the possibility of apologizing for various things in the historical past. Blair issued a public apology for the Irish potato famine. Unfortunately the media got a hold of it and wondered what else he would apologize for right back to the Garden of Eden. But the point remains that there is something around failure – admitting that people have made mistakes and apologizing for those mistakes — that is very hard for politicians to do. I have noticed it here on the television as well on this trip. The obsession with consistency on the part of Western politicians is an amazingly stupid thing. Why is it so difficult — to say the facts have changed, I see things differently, I’ve altered my position. It seems very, very difficult to do that. What I’m trying to say here is that you can take the idea of good enoughness away from the family dimension, and if you do that and use its connection to failure then you’ll come up with a very interesting take not only on leadership but also on politics generally.

One of the problems is that there is a tendency to overlook how people acquire the political opinions and values, attitudes and engagements that they’ve actually got. We all know we’re different in our views but how did you get to be the politician you are or, in my language, what is the state of your inner politician — that part of you that is essentially political. What is it like? Where did he or she come from? What was the influence of your mother or your father on your political views, your ideas and behaviors today? Just think for a second about the influence of your father on your politics. And what if your parents had very different political attitudes and opinions and argued about politics? How did that affect you? Sometimes people’s politics are very influenced by what I call a “surrogate political parent” who is often a teacher or a religious leader. Very often a young person a couple of years older than you said something at a critical time which deeply influenced you.

Sometimes a person’s politics is tremendously affected by a big event in their lives, a turning point. Did that happen to you and if so what was it? When was it? Did you talk about it with your therapist? The chances are that you did not. People are aware of political events they know are important to them – devastatingly important, fundamentally life enhancing – and yet after thousands of hours of therapy they have never talked about them. Therapists don’t feel able to work with that kind of material and patients know they are not supposed to bring it up, and therefore don’t.

Your sex is very important to the politics that you have and so is your sexual orientation. Anyone who is a lesbian, or a gay man, knows only too well that life is always lived on a political knife-edge. The socioeconomic standing of your family is extraordinarily important in your politics, and so also is what you have done with it. I’m very interested in what happens to the soul whose present economic situation is radically different from that of their parents. Whether they have “done better” or “done worse.” Psychoanalysts have a lovely phrase for the problem of doing better than your parents. They call it “oedipal victory,” and it’s a big, big problem. Doing well is a big problem. Social mobility is a big psychological problem and it affects people’s politics. Your religion affects your politics, your nationality affects your politics, your ethnicity affects your politics. The political person you are, the inner politician that is within you, has a history, has a present and has a future, and what I like to do is hybridize the language of therapy and the language of politics.

Yes it’s a muddle, yes it’s a mixture, but I think it is a fairly new language and it has taken me a lifetime to learn to speak it.