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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
Jung on War, Politics and Nazi Germany: Exploring the Theory of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
In the thirties Jung was at the height of his powers and found himself swept up in the international politics of his day. At this time he was president of what was to become the International General... (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)
Counselling and Psychotherapy with Refugees
This concise book is an essential tool to help counsellors and psychotherapists understand and engage with the experiences of persecution, violence and exile often faced by refugees. (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)