Andrew Samuels, Jungian Analyst and Author

Andrew conducts an exercise with two volunteers where he pursues the political myth of each. For him politics is an important part of therapeutic work. He investigates early family political influences on them and, having interviewed each separately, he brings them together to 'fantasise' about each other. In highlighting the discrepancies in their 'fantasies' he proffers a suggestion about their way forward.

"I think the transpersonal has been starring us in the face all the time - by which I mean that the most obvious transpersonal thing in our experience is social and political life, ordinary social and political life in the 'out there' world. And I suppose what this approach to the transpersonal is challenging is the idea that people who are interested in spirituality, in aspirations, in selfhood, those people are in a way avoiding something if they're not also at the same time interested in the social and political aspects of experience. So for me the social and the transpersonal have an enormous amount to do with eachother and that's a connection that a lot of people have fought very hard to deny. I like to see the relationship between psychology and phychotherapy on the one hand and politics on the other hand as a sort of 2-way street. Along one side of the street you see the application of psychological and psychotherapeutic ideas to the great political issues of the day - the economy, the environment, issues to do with nationalism and ethnicity, and without that side of the street being occupied the other side of the street has no right to be occupied. On this second side of the street we find what I call 'the politician within'. The secret life of politics, the way in which the old feminist slogan 'the personal is the policical' really does come true. Now on that second side of the street where one is really getting into the nitty gritty of the way in which the psyche and politics interact. On that side of the street there really is a role for therapy as it's practised in the session in the consulting and I think that what we're witnessing is a challenge to the traditional divide that's grown up between what you can do out there in the world, that's the first side of this street and what you can do in the privacy, in the contained, closed, sealed vessel of the therapy room which is the second side of the street. I want to see the traffic flowing freely up and down both sides, and if it doesn't flow up and down both sides then a moral and ethical crunch is reached, because if you just apply psychology and psychotherapy to the political it will be dry and arid and cut off from personal experience. But if you just keep it on the inner world level, people's political hopes, fears, their sense of empowerment or disempowerment and that gets cut off from the major issues of the day where people are suffering and even dying because of politics and economic theory and policy and so forth. If you keep that divide in existence then you are actually making a very serious ethical and moral problem for yourself".