Psychotherapy and Politics Books
The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness
This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and wellbeing, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich... (more)
Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference
Racism's external forms, from racial assault to petty discrimination, are readily recognized. However, its internal dimensions are easily overlooked: how can we understand what happens in the mind of... (more)
Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice, and Border Psychology
Aside from the many political, cultural and economic aspects of the present refugee crisis in Europe, it is also crucial to consider the psychological element. In our fast-changing world,... (more)
Freud: The Unconscious and World Affairs
This book sheds a new light on Freud, who from the beginning was aware that the psychoanalytic edifice he was constructing – which revealed in each individual an “ego not master in its own house” –... (more)
Thinking Space: Promoting Thinking About Race, Culture and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Beyond
'Thinking Space' was set up to develop the capacity of staff and trainees at the Tavistock Clinic to think about racism, and other forms of hatred toward difference in ourselves and others. Drawing... (more)
Shared Traumas, Silent Loss, Public and Private Mourning
This book aims to question the junctions of the private and the public when it comes to trauma, loss, and the work of mourning - notions which, it is argued, challenge our very ideas of the... (more)
A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action
This book relates the psychoanalytic journey of a man in his thirties, a grandson of a high-level SS officer, whose case illustrates how individuals can sometimes suffer greatly or cause the... (more)
Illusion and Reality: The Meaning of Anxiety
This work challenges the notion that anxiety and depression amount to a mental illness denoting that something is wrong with the individual sufferer. Instead, anxiety and depression are described as... (more)
The Origins of Unhappiness: A New Understanding of Personal Distress
It is the main argument of this book that emotional and psychological distress is often brought about through the operation of social-environmental powers which have their origin at a considerable... (more)
Taking Care: An Alternative to Therapy
Taking Care established David Smail as an important social and political analyst whose background happened to be in clinical psychology. In this work he develops the analysis of mental illness, and... (more)
Love in the Age of the Internet: Attachment in the Digital Era
This highly topical book explores the new technological environment we have created, and our adaptation to it, twenty-five years after the death of John Bowlby. In the space of just a couple of... (more)
Psychoanalysis, International Relations, and Diplomacy: 39649
The author has three goals in writing this book. The first is to explore large-group identity such as ethnic identity, diplomacy, political propaganda, terrorism and the role of leaders in... (more)
The Making of Them: The British Attitude to Children and the Boarding School System
This thought-provoking book reveals the bewildering dilemmas confronting the boarding school child, and discovers a dark secret at the heart of the British psyche. The author, a psychotherapist and... (more)
Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World: Embedded Meaning in Politics and Social Conflict
Psychoanalysis, Society, and the Inner World explores ideas from psychoanalysis that can be valuable in understanding social processes and institutions and in particular, how psychoanalytic ideas and... (more)
How to Survive Without Psychotherapy
This book is directly aimed at sufferers of mental distress. The book’s aim is to remove from sufferers the burden of 'fault' for their pain and to demystify some of the practices that surround the... (more)
Money as Emotional Currency
The importance of money and our relationship to it is impossible to ignore in a decade defined by global economic crisis and financial instability. Integrating a psychoanalytic perspective with... (more)
Respect, Plurality, and Prejudice: A Psychoanalytical and Philosophical Enquiry into the Dynamics of Social Exclusion and Discrimination
This book helps us understand the current resurgence of social prejudice against ethnic minority groups, the logics of scapegoating and the resulting violence.
Our time is characterised by a... (more)
Psychoanalysis and Politics: Exclusion and the Politics of Representation
Thinking psychoanalytically about the nature of social exclusion involves a self-questioning on the part of the interpreter. While we may all have some experiences of having been subject to... (more)
Losing the Race: Thinking Psychosocially about Racially Motivated Crime
Based on a two-year research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), this book explores why many of those involved in racially motivated crime seem to be struggling to cope... (more)
Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism
Our understanding of terrorism since the events of September 11th 2001 has usually been channelled through the two dimensional lens of religion and politics. This important new work contributes a... (more)
Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
A ground-breaking work in which the author makes the revolutionary link between the 'heroic' suffering of men in war and political struggle and the degraded suffering of women who are victims of... (more)
The Political Psyche: Classic Edition
What can depth psychology and politics offer each other? In The Political Psyche Andrew Samuels shows how the inner journey of analysis and psychotherapy and the passionate political convictions of... (more)
Wounded Leaders: British Elitism and the Entitlement Illusion - A Psychohistory
In an age when America elected its first black president and the Middle East stirred with popular uprising, Britons were again content to elect the products of their elitist Public Schools. But,... (more)
Passions, Persons, Psychotherapy, Politics: The Selected Works of Andrew Samuels
Andrew Samuels is one of the best known figures internationally in the fields of psychotherapy, Jungian analysis, relational psychoanalysis and counselling, and in academic studies in those areas.... (more)
Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace
For over thirty years, renowned psychoanalyst Vamik D. Volkan has applied the theories of his profession to societies in conflict, venturing into cauldrons of unrest as observer, mediator, and... (more)
The Couch in the Marketplace: Psychoanalysis and Social Reality
The book aims at bridging the conceptual and practical gap between a psychoanalytic focus on the internal world and the dynamics of external reality by examining an array of junctures in which the... (more)
Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia
This volume aims to question the recent revival of neo-nationalist policies in the light of what unconscious fantasies are involved in these developments. It examines both recent movements of... (more)
Racist States of Mind: Understanding the Perversion of Curiosity and Concern
Racism is a treacherous phenomenon with many faces that allow it a remarkable capacity to co-exist with support for ethnic and cultural diversity. In both its subtle and virulent forms, racist states... (more)
The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza
In the bestselling Affluenza, world-renowned psychologist Oliver James introduced us to a modern-day virus sweeping through the English-speaking world. He met those suffering from it and demonstrated... (more)
Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Changing World
The main purpose of this book is to look at a range of ubiquitous phenomena that make up our daily life and to ask not so much "whether" but "what" psychoanalytic thinking can add to our current... (more)