Psychotherapy and Politics Books
Dark Times: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Politics, History, and Mourning
Today sees the rise of nationalism, the return of totalitarian parties in Europe to electoral success, and the rise of the alt-right and white supremacists in the US. Thus, there is urgency for... (more)
The Unconscious in Social and Political Life
Traumatic events happen in every age, yet there is a particularly cataclysmic feeling to our own epoch that is so attractive to some and so terrifying to others. The terrible events of September 11th... (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)
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)
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)
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 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)
Transcending the Legacies of Slavery: A Psychoanalytic View
This book puts psychological trauma at its centre. Using psychoanalysis, it assesses what was lost, how it was lost and how the loss is compulsively repeated over generations. There is a... (more)
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)
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)
A New Therapy for Politics?
Andrew Samuels has established an international practice as a political consultant, working with senior politicians, political parties and activist groups. His lectures and workshops on the... (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)
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)
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)
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)
Freud and War
During the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism in Germany, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud asking the fundamental question: What can be done to liberate humanity from the menace of war? 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Minding the Markets: An Emotional Finance View of Financial Instability
The financial crisis of 2008 clarified what economic theories have long ignored. Emotions really matter. David Tuckett argues that economists' explanations for what happened in the Financial Crisis... (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)
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)
Racism and Cultural Diversity: Cultivating Racial Harmony through Counselling, Group Analysis, and Psychotherapy
M.J. Maher writes for all those interested in the dynamics of racism, from professionals in counselling, group analysis and psychotherapy working in multiracial and multicultural societies to those... (more)
Resilience, Suffering and Creativity: The Work of the Refugee Therapy Centre
The trauma of refugee status is particularly corrosive. It does the usual harm of devastating our own self-image and sense of permanence in the world, but it does more. It is a dislocation from our... (more)
Terrorism and War: Unconscious Dynamics of Political Violence
Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, one of the resounding questions asked was "What would make anyone do such a thing?" The psychological mentality of the suicidal terrorist left a gaping... (more)
Fear of Freedom
New edition in the 'Routledge Classics Series'. A psychoanalytical and historical work which asks whether the fear of freedom is the root of the 20th-century's predeliction for one or other kind of... (more)
Psychoanalysis, Class and Politics: Encounters in the Clinical Setting
Do political concerns belong in psychodynamic treatment? How do class and politics shape the unconscious? The effects of an increasingly polarized, insecure and threatening world mean that the... (more)