This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of 'countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways.

This chapter links psychoanalysis, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, and political/social criticism. I will begun by exploring some links between current understandings of 'countertransference' and the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, a term deriving from a different discipline but useful and suggestive in a variety of ways. Then I will try to move the resultant mixture in the general direction of politics, culminating in an attempt to depict a new kind of citizen that I call citizen-as-therapist.

To effect the initial link between a clinical concept such as countertransference and a wider idea such as the mundus imaginalis, I will be making use of a research project I have conducted in which the countertransference experiences of nearly thirty psychotherapists have been collected, collated and evaluated.

To effect the second move in a political direction, I shall describe workshops that I call 'political clinics' in which I try to operationalise this thinking. I think this is a somewhat unusual project and the empirical hands-on approach gives a firm base to my overall intent. This is to propose a theory that will, in pluralistic vein, harness together the functional realities of the analyst's profession and its implicit value system or ideology with a position statement about the relations between depth psychology and politics. There will be an interplay of technique and soul, data and emotion, questionnaire and rhetoric, process and content, relationship and image, left and right hemispheric activity.

By 'politics', I mean the concerted arrangements and struggles within an institution, or in a single society, or between the countries of the world for the organisation and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power. Politics concerns the way in which power is held or deployed by the state, by institutions, and by sectional interests to maintain survival, determine behaviour, gain control over others and, more positively perhaps, enhance the quality of human life. Politics implies efforts to change or transform these arrangements and efforts to maintain them. Economic and political power includes control of processes of information and representation to serve the interests of the powerful as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as land, food, water or oil.

On a more personal level, as feminist thinking demonstrates, there is a second kind of politics. Here, political power reflects struggles over agency, meaning the ability to choose freely whether -to act and what action to take in a given situation. But politics also refers to a crucial interplay between these two dimensions, between the public and private dimensions of power. There are connections between economic power and power as expressed on an intimate, domestic, level. Power is a process or network as much as a stable factor. This version of political power is demonstrated experientially: in family organisation, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as they affect the life of individuals.

Where the public and the private, the political and the personal, intersect or even meld there is a special role for depth psychology in relation to political change and transformation. The tragicomic crisis of our fin de de siecle civilisation incites us to challenge the boundaries that are conventionally accepted as existing between the external world and the internal world, between life and reflection, between extraversion and introversion, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between the political development of the person and the psychological development of the person, between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world. Subjectivity and intersubjectivity have political roots; they are not as 'internal' as they seem (cf. Samuels, 1993).

From its beginnings, depth psychology has been interested in the world of politics. In his paper entitled 'The claims of psychoanalysis to the interest of the nonpsychological sciences', written in 1913, Freud staked a claim for the proactive capacity of psychoanalysis:

To throw light on the origins of our great cultural institutions - on religion, morality, justice, and philosophy... Our knowledge of the neurotic illnesses of individuals has been of much assistance to our understanding of the great social institutions. (Freud, 1913a, p.235)

Jung made a similar point about the relationship of depth psychology and politics in a more reactive vein in 1946 in his preface to a collection of his essays on Nazi Germany:

We are living in times of great disruption: political passions are aflame, internal upheavals have brought nations to the brink of chaos.... This critical state of things has such a tremendous influence on the psychic life of the individual that the analyst ... feels the violence of its impact even in the quiet of his consulting room. ... The psychologist cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history, even if his very soul shrinks from the political uproar, the lying propaganda, and the jarring speeches of the demagogues. We need not mention his duties as a citizen, which confront him with a similar task (CW 10, para. 11).

At times, it seems that Freud and Jung were as interested in the broad sweep of cultural evolution and in an engagement with collective psychology as they were in their day-to-day work with clients. Certainly, there is a tension between their cultural and clinical projects and this is a tension that is still with their descendants today.

It certainly seems that the existence of a rupture between analysis and therapy in the consulting room and analysis and therapy in the political world is once again being challenged, if not exactly closed. We can tell that something significant is going on by the existence of fierce opposition to the challenge from those who regard the clinical as an untouchable, privileged category, on the basis of its contribution to the alleviation of human suffering.

Although I abhor that kind of clinical triumphalism, I do not suggest in this chapter that we should close all the consulting rooms. This is because I can see that clinical practice may be something other than a bastion of possessive individualism and 'narcissistic' introspection. It is right to criticise myopic (and greedy) clinicians who cannot apperceive that their work has a political and cultural location and implication. But it is not right to indulge in simplistic thinking that would do away with the entire clinical project of depth psychology. Without their connection to a clinical core, why should anyone listen to analysts and therapists at all? The rejection of the clinical forecloses what is, for me, the central issue: the relations between the private and the public spheres of life. This foreclosure mimics the attitude of the most conservative, dyed-in-the-wool clinicians and mental health professionals. The high-profile apostates of therapy (Hillman and Ventura, 1992; Masson, 1989) are as terrified of exploring the relations between the personal and the political as are the fanatical professional adherents of therapy. Both groups fail to see that the critique of analysis and therapy as self-indulgent, introspective and 'narcissistic' has been causing intense debates throughout the entire history of the enterprise. It is not a new dispute.

In fact, the history of depth psychology's attempt to do something about and in the world is so extensive and longstanding (the Frankfurt School, R.D. Laing etc.) that I have suggested Hillman and Ventura's title could well have been We've had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy's Attempts to Improve the World but the World's Stayed Pretty Much the Same.

The countertransference revolution

These are the words of one of the participants in the research project, writing about a client:

Veronica is 20 and single. She is depressed and lives at home with her parents; she works for a bank. At school she was a model pupil and head girl. She started drinking heavily in her late teens and turned down several offers of university places at the last moment. After my third session with her, as I was getting into my car, I experienced a sharp moment of anxiety, an image of a car crash came to me and I found myself thinking, 'What'll happen to Veronica if I have a car crash?'

The therapist knew that she was not going mad and that what had happened related to her client. She was an experienced worker and able to manage her shaken feelings. Her conclusion was that she was being affected by her client's massive feelings of destructiveness towards her and that her worry about the client's well-being was representative of the client's own guilt. The therapist regarded her countertransference reactions as having been stimulated by communications from the client. Though such reactions are by no means the only source of information about the client, they play a special part because of the depth and intensity of their impact upon the therapist. My concern is with this type of countertransference experience, to try to understand it and explain how such things can happen at all, and then move on to consider the political and social utility of these phenomena.

People who have never been analysts or therapists are often surprised to find that clinical practice is a red-hot emotional activity. It is not usually the case that a client quietly reports a problem to an analyst who then explains its origins by reference to specialised knowledge about such matters as childhood or the significance of chains of association. In particular, the analyst's state of mind often shows signs of altered levels of consciousness and the presence of intense fantasy and aroused emotion. These may lead to disturbed bodily and behavioural functioning on the analyst's part. These central features of the analyst's experience, which are the regular currency of discussion amongst clinicians have, rightly or wrongly, been tagged as 'countertransference' (see Rayner, 199 1; Slatker, 1987).

Those of my readers who are in clinical practice will know something of the revolution in clinical theorising that has taken place (see Clarkson, 1995, pp.62-107). This revolution has made it possible to review the analyst's subjective experience in a calm and considered way, underscoring its utility and resisting, but certainly not forgetting, the tendency to conclude that analysts are prone to mad responses to their clients. Because many readers will not be familiar with this revolution, I want to give a brief history of it. Although no hard-and-fast consensus exists about the use of the countertransference, something which need not dismay us (as we shall see), a definite historical trend in theorising about it can be observed. In this trend, countertransference experiences of the analyst are re-theorised as communications from the client and hence as being of clinical utility. Analysis and therapy result from an interplay of subjectivities - they are intersubjective phenomena; there is no subjectivity (no subject) without an Other (see Papadopoulos, 1991).

For Freud, it was apparently, but by no means exclusively, a problem that analysts reacted to their clients in ways that suggested neurosis (or even psychosis) on the analyst's part. Freud regarded these kinds of responses as undesirable and as something the analyst should overcome by more analysis or self-analysis. In the way Freud himself worked, it is clear that he did not function as a 'blank screen', as he seems to have had a strong personal presence in relation to his clients; this is apparent in his case histories. But it is also clear that, quite deliberately, from time to time he functioned as if he were a blank screen, a person without emotion or subjective life when seen from the client's point of view. In this way, he argued, the clients' projections of problematic figures from the past could be more freely transferred on to the person of the analyst - hence, 'transference' (which was also considered a phenomenon that interfered with treatment right at the very start of psychoanalytic endeavour).

By the 1950s, some analysts were, controversially, regarding countertransference as other than inevitably neurotic, seeing it as an informative phenomenon with distinct clinical value (e.g. Heimann, 1950). Nowadays there are numerous analysts who see their subjectivity, carried by the countertransference, as a central feature of the clinical encounter. Such analysts conceive of themselves as 'ready' for the experience of countertransference (Bollas, 1987, pp.201-3).

There have been parallel debates in analytical psychology but there has been less of a sense of overturning the applecart because Jung constantly asserted that the analyst was 'in' the treatment just as much as the client. In 1929 Jung regarded countertransference as a 'highly important organ of information' about the client and felt that an analyst who could not let him or herself be influenced by the client's psychological emissions would be an ineffective clinician (CW16, para. 163).

There are many strands of post-Freudian theorising about the countertransference. One strand lays emphasis on the analyst's emotions and emotionality, meaning his or her total involvement in the analytical process. The idea is that the analyst's unconscious somehow 'understands' that of the client in an empathic, feeling manner. This view is claimed, with justification, to stem from Freud who, in spite of warning against the possibility of neurosis in the analyst, also referred to the analyst's unconscious as a receptive organ' in relation to the 'transmitting unconscious of the patient' (1913b, p.194). Psychoanalysts (and analytical psychologists) who have theorised treatment as an emotional encounter do not, on the whole, advocate spontaneous or simple (as opposed to disciplined) disclosure or sharing of their emotional states with their clients.

Another strand of post-Freudian thinking about countertransference makes use of a form of communication theory. Everything that happens between the analyst and client, whether originating in analyst or client, may be regarded as a symbolic communication. This permits a further revision - in this instance, it is a revision of the role of the client. The client is regarded as a person who helps the analyst conduct the treatment, pointing out errors and misjudgements either directly or by communication with the analyst's unconscious. In the latter case, it is the analyst's countertransference that provides the means by which the client can communicate his corrections of the analyst's errors (Langs, 1978).

A third way in which contemporary psychoanalysis has modified Freud's views of countertransference also makes use of a notion of communication. But in this approach communication is understood as the interplay of projective and introjective processes, the movement of psychological material between people, out of one and into the other and, maybe, back again. These processes are understood as special variants of generally occurring psychosocial phenomena and so countertransference theorising can be understood as part of a wider apprehension of how people communicate. The advantage of this theory is that it is possible to see how parts of the client's psyche crop up in the analyst's subjectivity, and vice versa (Racker, 1968). Post-Jungian theorising about countertransference has made use of similar thinking about projection and introjection.

The concern and preoccupation with countertransference has reached a peak in Britain and Latin America, where it sometimes seems that analysis consists of nothing but an exploration of the countertransference, But the United States, Germany and Italy are rapidly catching up, as a review of the literature demonstrates (Gorkin, 1987, pp.81104).

The situation in France is different. Jacques Lacan criticised (quite correctly, in my view) tendencies to fashion ego-to-ego communication out of the countertransference (1988, pp.30-3). However, Lacan's view of what happens dramatically oversimplifies the experience and practices of those who pioneered a revision of Freud's methodological suggestions. Though the question of disclosure remains a pressing one, Lacan overlooks the issues of the level of the analyst's disclosure and the work he or she might do on what is to be disclosed prior to communicating it (see M. Stanton, 1977, pp. 29-47).

Research project

The hypothesis

Before introducing more of the research material, I want to state the hypothesis on which the project was based. My thinking is that there are two rather different sorts of usable countertransference - though both may be seen as communications from the client. The difference between the two is shown in this simple example. Suppose, after a session with a particular client, I feel depressed (this may be a single occurrence or part of a series). Now I may know from my own reading of myself that I am not actually depressed, and certainly not seriously depressed. I may conclude that the depressed state I am in is a result of my close contact with this particular client. It may be that the client is feeling depressed right now and that neither of us is aware of that. In this instance, my depression is a reflection of his or her depression. So I would call this an example of reflective countertransference. In time, I may be able to make use of this knowledge, particularly if I had not realised the existence (or extent) of the client's depression. But there is another possibility. My experience of becoming a depressed person may stem from the presence and operation of such a 'person' in the client's psyche. The client may have experienced a parent as depressed and my reaction precisely embodies the client's emotionally experienced parent. I have also become a part of the client's inner world. I stress 'inner world' rather than the client's actual infancy or history to make the point that I am not attempting any kind of factual reconstruction. That 'person' will inevitably also be symbolic of a theme active in the client's psyche or of a part of his personality This entire state of affairs I have come to call embodied countertransference and it is to be distinguished from the former category of reflective countertransference. There is a considerable difference between, on the one hand, my reflecting of the here-and-now state of my client, feeling just what he or she is unconscious of at the moment, and, on the other, my embodiment of an entity, theme, or person of a longstanding, intrapsychic, inner-world nature. One problem for the analyst is that, experientially, the two states may seem similar. Perhaps some countertransferences are both reflective and embodied.

'Embodied' is intended to suggest a physical, actual, material, sensual expression in the analyst of something in the client's inner world, a drawing together and solidification of this, an incarnation by the analyst of a part of the client's psyche and, as the Shorter oxford English Dictionary defines it, a 'clothing' by the analyst of the client's soul. If our psyche tends to personify, as Jung suggests, then embodiment speaks of the way the person/analyst plays his or her part in that.

I am grateful to Neville Symington (personal communication, 1986) for suggesting that it is important to distinguish between countertransference states in the analyst that refer to the client's ego and countertransference states that refer more to the client's objects. Reflective countertransference would, I think, refer more to the client's ego position whereas embodied countertransference could refer to either the client's ego or to his or her objects, according to the specific context. The main point is that the problem that the analyst and client are working on can become embodied in the analyst.

Now any analyst who proposes new terms must explain why he or she does so in order not to be charged with word-mongering. This is particularly the case when, as in this instance, the new terms overlap with those already in use. Fordham's concept (1957) of syntonic countertransference is one for which 1, in common with many Jungian analysts, am extremely grateful. His achievement was to drag analysts out of their ivory towers, help them truly to listen to what their clients were trying to tell them, and make a reality out of pious commitments to 'the dialectical approach'. But gradually I began to feel that the term 'syntonic' was distant from my experience; often one does not feel in tune with the client in these countertransferences and there may be dissonance inside oneself Later, it may be clear that one was in tune. So 'syntonic' leans too much towards an Olympian standpoint, intellectual, even technical or technological, and, hence, to radiate commitment to a mode of observation more suited to the outer world than to the empathic processes we are talking about. Embodiment, on the other hand, does imply a becoming, with its consequent involvements, and also a suggestion of a medium for countertransference communications from the client; this, it will turn out, is often the analyst's body. Again, many of these countertransference states are nonverbal or pre-verbal - and embodiment speaks to that.

The unease with the notion of syntonic countertransference was a particular problem for me, as I was deliberately trying to keep my theorising on the 'low road', 'experience-near', in Kohut's phrases, using the empirical stance and data collection together with an empathic attitude (Kohut, 1982). So I chose the terms 'embodied' and 'reflective' quite deliberately, to be of help in the task of bracketing together countertransference (specific to the practice of analysis) and the mundus imaginalis, a more general, cultural term employed in archetypal psychology. it may turn out that these ideas particularise and extend Fordham's theory - paradoxically by invoking an approach with which he was in total disagreement (numerous personal communications 1976-94).

The term 'incarnate', which was one of the associations to which embodiment led, has a history in analytical psychology. It was first used in 1956 by Plaut to describe how an analyst may have to let himself become what the client's imagery dictates he be. However, Plaut's pioneering paper referred to the analyst's reactions to transference projections of which he was aware, and to his control (or lack of it) of his response. For example, what to do when a woman client saw him as a remarkable teacher: should he contradict this, teach her about wise old men, or 'incarnate' the image so as to develop a knowledge of how to use it? Plaut's concern was not with states in the analyst that are apparently devoid of any causation outside of the analytical relationship.

It should be reiterated that not all countertransference reactions are usable communications from the client. We need to bear neurotic countertransference in mind - identifying with the client, idealising the client, the analyst's retaliation to the client's aggression, his or her destruction of his or her own work, his or her attempt to satisfy his or her own infantile needs through the relationship with the client. Nor is it always immediately clear what the client's communications mean. As Jung said, the analyst may have to stay in a muddled, bewildered state for a period, allowing an understanding to germinate, if it will. An ability to rest with the anxiety and maintain an attitude of affective involvement becomes crucial.

The results

I will turn now to the material that I gathered through the research project. I embarked on it because I felt a need to check hypotheses like the reflective/embodied countertransference model and did not trust myself to use my own case material in isolation. For many years, I had been giving seminars to psychotherapy trainees in which I suggested that there were these two sorts of countertransference. I contacted 32 qualified psychotherapists who had been in supervision with me during this period and asked them for a few examples of countertransference reactions of theirs that they considered to result from the unconscious communications of their clients (see Table I for the questionnaire). The hypothesis that there are two different kinds of countertransference was restated, and the participants were reminded of the existence of neurotic countertransference. The countertransference reaction was to be reported in detail and I asked which kind of countertransference this was thought to be and how this experience had affected the work. The final question, which summarises the intent of the whole project, was: 'Can you say how the clients may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you?'

It may also be necessary to justify such empiricism to those who see it as opposed to poetic, rhetorical, imaginal explorations. An empirical base does not necessarily lead to prosaic conclusions. The findings of the project are quite the opposite. Empiricism, as expressed in this research venture, supports a poetic, metaphorical, imaginal explanation for the mysterious workings of countertransference.

The 26 completed replies covered a total of 57 cases. Because some cases involved more than one example of a countertransference communication and because some countertransferences could be said to be both reflective and embodied, the total of such examples came to 76. Of these, 35 (46%) were held by the respondents to be of embodied countertransference and 41 (54%) of reflective countertransference.

Table 1. questions I asked the participants in the research project
1. Age of client
2. Your age
3. Marital status of client
4. Your marital status
5. Presenting problem(s)
6. Brief history of client
7. Countertransference experience in detail
8. Is this reflective or embodied?
9. How did this affect the future of the work?
10. How did this affect your understanding of the history?
11. Can you say how the client may have provoked or evoked these feelings in you? What did they say or do?
12. Any other comments?

It was abundantly clear that the participants could see how to use such a classification of countertransference. Here is an example said to be of embodied countertransference. The client was a young, unmarried woman who had presented originally with a mixture of intolerable guilt accompanied by a sense of responsibility for the spiritual and moral welfare of others. She had also had a depressive breakdown. She had had several traumatic religious experiences in childhood. This is the therapist's account:

This event happened after three years of work when we were thinking of adding a second session. She was always extremely controlled, with periods in every session which felt almost autistic. She said nothing which had not already been minutely examined 'inside'. She watched my face for the slightest move, flicker of an eye, for instance, and would interpret what she thought she saw there - to herself - as me laughing at her, getting fed up with her, getting irritated by her. I suggested that perhaps one day she might feel able to entrust a bit more of what was inside to me, with the feeling that I would not change it or take it away, -that I could just hold it. As I was speaking I had a very strong impression or image of a large black open-mouthed pot which was strong yet open - like a big belly. The pot was huge and black and also like a witch's cauldron (I later realised). I said to her that it would be rather like having a pot which she could safely leave things in. Her immediate reaction was that it would be like a wall which something had been hurled at violently. My instantaneous image was of a violent expelling-type vomit, running down the wall, uncontained and wasted. We were both quite staggered by the strength and opposite nature of the two images we had had.

The therapist felt that the pot image demonstrated that the client's mother had longed to be of use to her. But the witch's cauldron and the image of vomiting suggest something else besides. The cauldron was described as big enough to swallow up a human being - and hence a sinister and dangerous part-self or splinter psyche within the client. Thus there were two aspects to this embodied countertransference: her mother's longing on the one hand and, on the other, an embodiment by the therapist of a split-off part of the client's psyche.

The next illustration is an example of a reflective countertransference. This therapist found herself coming to supervision with me in clothes very much like those worn by her client at their most recent session. This was something she realised during the supervision, but, in fact, I had been struck by the clothes she was wearing the moment I met her at the door: a little-boy presentation, school sweater, crooked tie and collar, muddied, practical shoes. And, though I did not know it, she was wearing a coat of the same colour as her client's, a coat she had not worn for years until that day As we talked, it became clear that the client had never felt able to relate closely to her mother. She was the middle of three daughters and had been 'assigned' to her father - memories of being placed, unwillingly, on his knee. She had never felt 'at one' with her mother. And she certainly could not let herself feel like her mother, like a woman. The way she had resolved this was to let herself be 'Daddy's girl' but in a way that ruled out incestuous involvement (the little-boy strategy).

The therapist's behaviour, in which she became merged with her client, might have been considered neurotic. But the notion that it reflects her client's desire to be at one with her therapist, and, indeed, her whole life struggle to obtain mothering, is equally plausible. For instance, the therapist writes: 'In some ways she had been treating me like a man although she had sought out a woman therapist. I found myself being more active and penetrating than my usual style and generally more assertive.' Mattinson (1975) has written of the way in which the dynamics of one situation (therapy) are reflected in those of an adjacent situation (supervision).

What I have been describing was, for me, a confirmation of a hypothesis. As I mentioned earlier, in addition to that, it was also possible to detect an overall pattern in the 76 countertransference responses and, moreover, one about which I had had no hypothesis. The countertransference responses described fell into distinct groups or categories, as follows.

• First, bodily and bebavioural responses. For example, wearing the same clothes at the client, walking into a lamp-post, forgetting to discuss something important, a strange sensation in the solar plexus, a pain in a particular part of the body, sexual arousal, sleep.
• Second, feeling responses. For example: anger, impatience, powerfulness, powerlessness, envy, irritation, depression, manipulation, redundancy, being flooded, bored.
• Finally, fantasy responses. For example: this is the wrong client, there's something wrong with my feet, a large black pot, I killed her mother, I'm a prostitute, I feel reverence for her serious, private place, be has God on his side, all colour has gone out of the world, a car crash, he'll rummage through my desk and books if I leave the room, the client is getting bigger and bigger and is filling the room.

Exposing myself to these accounts, this time without the protection of the reflective/embodied theory, made me aware that all these instances of countertransference may be said to be images, and this is true even of the bodily or feeling responses. They are images because they are active in the psyche in the absence of a direct stimulus which could be said to have caused them to exist. That is, nothing has been done to the analyst that would, in the usual way of things, explain the presence of such a reaction in him or her. A person may be conscious or unconscious of an image but, either way, the image may be regarded as promoting feelings and behaviour and not as secondary, a coded message about them (cf. Newton, 1965 or Kugler's (1982) use of a term such as 'acoustic image').

In the questionnaire, I also asked the participants what was the presenting problem of their clients. One finding is particularly interesting. It would seem that clients with instinctual (sex, aggression, food) problems are more likely to evoke reflective and embodied countertransference than other clients. What is highlighted, therefore, is the special part that may be played by the body in the client's evocation of countertransference in the analyst. This bodily proposition will have to be looked at later, alongside the earlier idea that it is the image that is the decisive factor. Here, the mundus imaginalis turned out to be relevant. In both the 'pot' example of embodied countertransference and the 'clothes' example of reflective countertransference, imagery and bodily perceptions played intermingled roles. In sum: the hope is that these findings justify a classification of usable countertransference responses into reflective and embodied, and that both terms accurately depict what happens. Further, the additional grouping of countertransferences under the headings of bodily and behavioural, feeling, and fantasy responses may also be justified.

Implications for technique

A central technical issue is constellated by a vision of countertransference as a possible communication from the client: what is the analyst to do with the knowledge he or she may gain from an analysis of his or her counter-transference experiences? Should he or she disclose them to the client? If so, how? Should the analyst weld his or her understanding of the countertransference into his or her interpretations? If so, how? Should he or she do little more than stay in touch with what is being discovered?

When I first began to think about these matters, I expected to find a sharp divide between Freudians and Jungians, with the latter group being more willing, even eager, to disclose countertransference material. True, a few Jungian analysts (e.g. Stein, 1987) are strong advocates of disclosure, particularly of feelings about the client generated in the analyst. But even such an extreme viewpoint is also represented in psychoanalysis, for example by Winnicott in 'Hate in the countertransference' (1949). The comprehensive literature review in Gorkin (1987) suggests strongly that there are numerous psychoanalysts who can see occasions on which it is advisable and justifiable to disclose countertransference. In psychoanalysis much more has been written about the kind of client with whom this is appropriate than in analytical psychology.

Perhaps because of the Freudian/Jungian consensus referred to above, most analysts seem to agree with Segal's position, summarised by Casement (1986, p,548):

The analyst is in no position to interpret if the interpretation is based only upon what the analyst is feeling in the session. Unless it is possible to identify how the client is contributing to what the analyst is feeling, and in such a way that the client could recognise this, then it is better to remain silent.

Casement notes the twin dangers of gratifying clients who want a magician for an analyst and of persecuting others with omniscience. Precisely because of dangers like these, I felt it necessary to go on with my investigations of countertransference, so as to find an ideological basis for the careful use of the tacit knowledge of the client that the countertransference can provide for the analyst. In other words, I think more is needed than an understanding of the dynamics of any one client. What is required is an understanding of how these phenomena generally tend to function. I do not mean a tight theory or categorisation, because that would defeat the purpose of utilising countertransference, but I do mean something more than clinical Pragmatics. My working out of the theme of the mundus imaginalis is intended to be that kind of ideological project.

Succinctly, an understanding of what it is that the analyst reflects or/and embodies can serve as a kind of resource out of which he or she fashions the actual words and images of the interpretation, rendering them fresh and, above all related to the client - hence not 'cliche interpretations' (Casement, 1986).

What I aim at is summarised thrillingly in this note sent by Bion to Meltzer (who quotes it in 1978, p. 126):

Now I would use as a model: the diamond cutter's method of cutting a stone so that a ray of light entering the stone is reflected back by the same path in such a way that the light is augmented the same 'free association' is reflected back by the same path, but with augmented 'brilliance'. So the patient is able to see his ,reflection', only more clearly than he can see his personality as expressed by himself alone (i.e. without an analyst).

The mundus imaginalis

The mundus imaginalis, the imaginal world, is a term employed by Henry Corbin, the French philosopher and scholar of Islam (Corbin, 1972, 1978, 1983). To use this term in an analytic context is not in itself original. Hillman's suggestion that we practise 'Jung's technique with Corbin's vision' is a precursor (Hillman, 1980). This enables us to include inside the mundus imaginalis those images that Corbin regarded as a 'secularisation of the imaginal': grotesque, painful, pathological - analytical material. The mundus imaginalis refers to a precise order or level of reality, located somewhere between primary sense impressions and more developed cognition or spirituality.

The mundus imaginalis (Hillman adds) enables us to speak of the location of the archetypal. So we begin to regard the psyche as structured by its images alone rather than by unknowable, irrepresentable, theoretical, archetypes (see Samuels, 1985, pp31-2; 1989, pp-15-65). Fordham also in a sense joined Hillman when he wondered whether the conventional archetypal structure/archetypal image split in analytical psychology has any meaning. Fordham's point was that the word 'image' in the term 'archetypal image' is redundant because no archetype can be discussed or have any being without an image; hence, 'archetype' includes and implies an image (Fordham, 1970, p.297). Hillman's version of the same argument was that, as we cannot even conceive of the so-called noumenal, hypothetical, archetype without an image, it is the image that is primary (Hillman, 1980, p.33n).

As Corbin sees it, the mundus imaginalis is an in-between state, an intermediate dimension, in his original French entre-deux, which may even have the meaning: 'neither one thing nor another' (Corbin, 1983, p.1). It is possible to see, therefore, how the mundus imaginalis acquired a relevance for the countertransference phenomena we have been discussing. They, too, are intermediate: in between client and analyst, and also in-between the analyst's conscious and unconscious. My use of Corbin's idea involves the suggestion that two persons, in a certain kind of relationship, may constitute, or gain access to, or be linked by, that level of reality known as the mundus imaginalis. For the client, the analyst him/herself is an in-between, a real person and also a transference projection. For the analyst, the world he or she shares with the client is also the client's own imaginal world.

When the analyst experiences his or her countertransference on a personal level and yet knows its roots are in the client, it is an inbetween state. To be sure, it is his or her body, his or her imagery, his or her feelings or fantasies. But these things also belong to the client, and have been squeezed into being and given substance by the analytical relationship. It would be a great mistake for the analyst to remain enmeshed in subjectivity (actually in possessiveness) or compulsive introspection or self-blame. What appeared to have happened to him or her and in him or her is truly in between the analyst and the client, imaginally real not subjectively real.

My suggestion is that there is a two-person or shared mundus itnaginalis that is constellated in analysis. To justify this, it is necessary to take the parallels further, and deeper, though bearing in mind what a further, literal translation of entre-deux as 'between two people' might suggest to us.

Corbin refers to the mundus imaginalis as having a 'central mediating function' so that all levels of reality may 'symbolise with each other' (Corbin, 1972, p.9). The parallel is with the way the analyst symbolises something for the client. The analyst's ego is a special kind of ego, highly permeable and flexible and having as its central mediating function the operation of the sluice gates between image and understanding. Again, Corbin writes of the way 'inner and hidden reality turns out to envelop, surround or contain that which at first was outer and visible' (Corbin, 1972, p.5). The analyst's countertransference response is outer and visible; what is inner and hidden is the client's psychic reality that certainly envelops the analyst. For Corbin, the mundus imaginalis is a 'fully objective and real world with equivalents for everything existing in the sensible world without being perceptible by the senses' (Corbin, 1972, p.7). In the analyst's countertransference we see equivalents of the client's internal reality, even though the sensory data for the analyst's experience is missing. Hence, there is a further rationale for referring generally to these countertransferences as images.

Of all the suggestive possibilities for analysis to be found in Corbin's work, it is his equation of the mundus imaginalis with visionary states that I should like to develop (Corbin, 1972, p.4). The experiences of countertransference, as described in this paper, may be regarded as visions. No direct sensory stimulus is involved in a vision and also the experience is not of an intellectual nature. Jung made the additional point that no deliberate act of imagination is involved either (Jung, 1963, p-327). All these facts are relevant to countertransference.

Many of the extraordinarily powerful experiences and images I have been discussing are also described by Jung when he refers to visions as 'disturbing spectacles of some tremendous process that in every way transcend our human feeling and understanding' (CW15, para.141). Jung goes on to ask: 'Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the darknesses of the spirit, or of the primal beginnings of the human psyche? 'We may add to the list: visions of another's psyche, empathic visions, analytical visions. Corbin's reference (Corbin, 1983, p.1) is to 'the organ of visionary knowledge'; for an analyst, when he is doing analysis, that organ is his countertransference.

The argument so far is that the mundus imaginalis functions as a linking factor between client and analyst and that some of the analyst's countertransference may be regarded as visions and hence part of this imaginal world. What I want to do now is to relate the proposed connection between countertransference and the mundus imaginalis to what emerged from the research project, in particular, to explore what the analyst's body and the mundus imaginalis have in common.

Using Corbin's metaphor, the analyst's body becomes less literal, a subtle body', a 'being in suspense', a link between soul and corporeality (Corbin, 1972, p.9). What I am trying to convey is that, in analysis, the analyst's body is not entirely his or her own and what it says to him or her is not a message for him or her alone. In pursuance of this healing of the body/soul dichotomy, I may add to the term 'analytical visions' another: bodily visions - 'not-me possessions' of the analyst.

It is not just Corbin who has explored this area; Jung, too, wrote of the in-between world, referring to it as esse in anima. And Jung also had something to say about these connections between body, senseimpressions, fantasy, and the subjective/objective dynamic. He wrote:

A third, mediating standpoint is needed. Esse in intellectu lacks tangible reality, esse in re lacks mind.... Living reality is the product neither of the actual behavior of things, nor of the formulated idea exclusively, but rather of the combination of both (CW6, para. 77).

Jung went on to refer to this combination as fantasy, adding that fantasy 'fashions the bridge between the irreconcilable claims of subject and object' (my italics).

Capturing what is meant by bodily visions takes me once more back to Corbin. He was interested in studying what he described as 'the organ which perceives' the mundus imaginalis; this he refers to as 'imaginative consciousness' (Corbin, 1972, p.2). The analyst's imaginative consciousness and his perception of his bodily visions, apparently so disparate, may more accurately be seen as two different ways of approaching the same goal. For bodily perception is quite different from other kinds of perception because there is no specific organ that comes to mind in connection with it. As the philosopher Armstrong puts it:

When I feel the heat of my hand, the motion of my limbs, the beating of my heart or the distension of my stomach, and do not feel these things by exploring my body with another portion of my body, there is no natural answer to the question 'What do you feet these states of your body with?' (Armstrong, 1962, p. 10).

It was this argument that led Armstrong to propose that notion of 'bodily perception' and, as I hinted just now, his use of it and Corbin's of 'imaginative consciousness' are rather similar. Whichever of these terms is used, the issue that then emerges concerns the fate of the mundus imaginalis in analysis. Corbin writes that the mundus imaginalis can be useful and productive in linking intellect and sense impressions (Corbin, 1983, p.1). Or it can-remain subservient to sense impressions and not serve the intellect. If this occurs, there is a resemblance to the analyst's remaining unaware of the implications of his or her countertransference; his or her bodily vision will not have a use.

The link between body and image is waiting to be further verbalised. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare wrote that 'imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown' (Act 5, Scene 1). If counter transference communications are both images and bodily visions, then body and image shimmer to get her almost to the point of fusion. Here we may find quite another message in the word 'incarnate', that outgrowth of 'embodied'. When Plaut explained in 1970 what he had meant when he used the word in 1956, he was worried that the religious association to 'incarnate' (spirit made flesh) had been troublesome. It seems to me, however, that his intuition was reliable. In the countertransference experience, the image is being made flesh. Where that means that the Other (the client's psyche) is becoming personal (in the analyst's body), I would conclude that an analyst's countertransference may be further understood by regarding it as a religious or mystical experience.

Before this is dismissed as fanciful, parallels might be drawn between countertransference and a well-known list of the characteristics of the mystical experience (Happold, 1963, pp.45-7).

• First, mystical states are ineffable; that is, they cannot be fully described to one who has not experienced something similar.
• Second, mystical states lead to knowledge and insight, often delivered with a tremendous sense of authority.
• Third, mystical states are transient.
• Fourth, mystical states happen to a person; even if he or she prepared him/herself, he or she is gripped by a power that feels quite foreign.
• Fifth, there is a sense that everything is connected to everything else, an intimation of purpose.
• Sixth, the mystical experience is timeless.
• Finally, the familiar ego is sensed not to be the real 'I' (see Powell, 1985).

These points can be compared to the counter-transference described in this paper. It is difficult to explain them to one who has not experienced them. The analyst does gain insights from them, often in a shattering way Countertransference states are momentary. Even analytical training cannot fully anticipate or prepare for the countertransference experience. One does feel connected to one's client, in an intimacy at once beautiful and unbearable. Countertransference reactions have no sense of history-, past and present are jumbled, Finally, the analyst knows his or her ego is not responsible for what is happening to him or her.

Koss (1986) also suggested that states of possession entered into by spirit healers may be compared to typical countertransference experiences. Similarly, in Chassidic mysticism, reference is made to a quality known as Hitlababut, or ecstasy Buber held that this quality transforms ordinary knowledge into a knowledge of the meaning of life. For the Chassids, Hitlababut expresses itself bodily, in dance. As Buber says, in dance 'the whole body becomes subservient to the ecstatic soul' (Buber, 1931, p-35). Analysis, too, is a form of dance, and ecstasy is not an inappropriate word to describe some of the emotions generated (and reported in the research project).

Corbin regards the mundus imaginalis as 'indispensable for placing the visions of prophets and mystics, this is because it is there that they 'take place' and deprived of the imaginal world they no longer "take place... (Corbin, 1978, p.4). Both reflective and embodied countertransference have their location in the mundus imaginalis, which is also the medium for their transmission. These connections between mysticism and analysis need not seem surprising. Psychology and religion cannot simply let go of each other. it is not enough to say that one explores depths and the other heights, that one is about soul and the other about spirit, one about dreams and the other about miracles, that one is concerned with immanence and the other with transcendence. It is not the case that this analytical mysticism is a mysticism of the one true God. Far from it. Analysis is a mysticism of persons - and hence polyvalent, pluralistic, many-headed, many-bodied.

The idea of a mysticism of (or between) persons is one by which contemporary theology is captivated (and this in addition to Buber's work). For example, a theologian writes: 'There is no point at all in blinking at the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union' (Zaehner, 1957, p-151). The erotic dimension is introduced purposefully: transference, incest, sexuality form one spine of analysis. This is how D. H. Lawrence describes lovemaking in Sons and Lovers: 'His hands were like creatures, living; his limbs, his body, were all life and consciousness, subject to no will of his, but living in themselves.'

Throwing out an idea for a future discussion, and leaning heavily on Bion (1970), may not the analyst also function as a mystic for the wider group of society as a whole, or some analysts so function within their own milieux? That is why it is so important to keep avenues of communication open to psychoanalysis and the psychodynamic mainstream to make sure that imaginal, analytical mysticism has a context and does not expend itself onanistically and nihilistically.

So I will return to that mainstream for a while. In the way I have been writing about it, the mundus imaginalis has similar properties to what Winnicott called 'the third area', sometimes 'the area of experience', sometimes 'the area of illusion' (Winnicott, 1974). This area of the psyche lies in between external life and internal reality but both contribute to it. Of course, there are differences between Winnicott and Corbin. Corbin writes of a pre-existing intermediate dimension, Winnicott of the intermediate as a joint creation of both poles. Corbin's metaphor struck me more forcibly than Winnicott's as far as countertransference is concerned. But Winnicott evolved his ideas out of his study of what two people experience in a very special relationship. This means he had interpersonal activity in mind as well as his concern for the internal world. This helps flesh out my suggestion that we can speak of a twoperson mundus imaginalis or of a mysticism of persons. What Winnicott writes of the third area repays attention:

It is an area that is not challenged, because no claims are made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated (Winnicott, 1974, p-3).

I will try to anticipate a few objections to what has been proposed. These could be on the traditional ground that anything to do with the archetypal must consist of the products of the collective unconscious. Mother, the analyst's anger, walking into a lamp-post - what have these to do with the objective psyche? I do not anticipate such an objection from those who have worked more deeply on what is to be understood as archetypal. Hillman, for instance, writes that 'archetypal psychology cannot separate the personal and the collective unconscious, for within every complex, fantasy, and image of the personal psyche is an archetypal power' (Hillman, 1975, pp. 179-80). There, and in numerous other passages, Hillman has reached the same place as those who, from the developmental (Samuels, 1985) perspective, regard the personal and the collective as indivisible. The distinction is that, whereas Hillman searches for an archetypal perspective on the personal, developmental writers such as Williams are committed to a personal perspective on the archetypal (Williams, 1963).

A further possible objection would be that the mundus imaginalis is too precise an explanation for reflective and embodied countertransference. These, it would be argued, are merely manifestations of the self (or Self) in its transpersonal guise, or the result of our collective unconscious heritage. I would agree that it is our joint and mutual connection to these factors that permits us even to discuss countertransference as communication. But this is insufficient as either description or explanation and may rest upon an idealisation of the self or the concept of the collective unconscious. Although it could be said that archetypal images have a power that enables them to be experienced as collective, I would prefer to say that images that turn out to be collective then generate an archetypal power.

For another group of objectors, the concept of projective identification may be sufficient to explain the aspects of countertransference phenomena I have been discussing. However, projective identification, while undoubtedly playing a part in the formation of transference and countertransference, lacks something as an explanatory theory. In fact, as Meltzer points out, 'we are still in the process of discovering what projective identification "means". Meltzer's suggestion is that projective identification is an 'empty' concept, the result of an intuition of Klein's, and requiring clinical substantiation which, in the nature of things, will in fact be based on the use of the concept itself, for analysts cannot ignore it (Meltzer, 1978, pp.38-9). The mundus imaginalis hypothesis can be used alongside the concept of projective identification by postulating on what projective identification is based, and then what it is that enables its operation to take place. Using words from other disciplines, the search is, respectively, for the 'rhizome' that nurtures projective identification and for the 'ether' that facilitates its transmission. Such factors would, by definition, be 'objective' (that is, collective or nonpersonal) and also require distinguishing from projective identification as a defence mechanism for an individual, even with an extension of its meaning to include normal, lifelong mental functioning.

By bringing in the images of the ether and a rhizome, I am trying to challenge the notion of empty space. We don't need to ask why projections travel, because they don't travel - the individuals concerned are already linked. It seems that the mundus imaginalis hypothesis fits in well with theories of personality development that postulate an initial togetherness, with fantasies of oneness. The baby in a state of being and the baby's objects are one (cf, Winnicott, 1974, p.80).

The interpersonal and the intrapsychic: on persons and images

Up to now, I have been acting as matchmaker for two views of analysis and therapy: one empirical and the other poetic, one in which countertransference becomes the root of the analyst's technique of interpretation and one in which such a clinical confine is anathema. Fordham's technique with Hillman's vision? The offspring of this particular marriage confronts us with a fascinating problem: do we gain anything from our habitual division between the interpersonal (that is, relationship) and the intrapsychic (that is, image)? What the project showed is that the interaction of client and analyst and their relationship can be placed firmly within the imaginal realm without forgetting that there are two people present. An analyst can think, feel, or behave as if he or she were the client, and also he or she can function as a part of the client's psyche so that the mundus imaginalis becomes a shared dimension of experience. When we consider or reconsider our attitude to the division between the interpersonal and the intrapsychic, there is no need to fear an abandonment of the human element. In fact, I would suggest that, in the same way that our notion of the intrapsychic, internal world includes the part played by relations with other persons, our definition of what is interpersonal may also be enriched and expanded. Then internal imagery becomes seen as linking two people, the client and analyst, and as fostering their relationship. It follows that to divorce work on the apparently imaginal and work on the apparently interpersonal is conceptually in error and practically limiting.

For it is no longer a question of opposing an examination of interpersonal communication to an examination of the imaginal world. If the idea of a two-person mundus imaginalis is taken seriously, then we must regard the interpersonal in terms of psyche speaking, and the imaginal in terms of an avenue of communication between two people, a relationship. Persons may carry imagery; imagery may originate in persons. It is necessary to see our field of reference in analysis as seamless and continuous so that ostensible 'images' and ostensible 'interpersonal communications' do not get separated, nor one gain ascendancy over the other on the basis of a preconceived hierarchy of importance. The coin is three-sided; to body and image can be added relationship.

This overlay between an interpersonal relationship and the intrapsychic image is addressed by Jung when he writes of alchemy, particularly in The Psychology of the Transference (CW 16). Looking at the woodcuts of the Rosarium, one finds it quite impossible to say with conviction that this is solely about a two-person process. Equally, what is being depicted is not just one person's individuation. The focus of enquiry includes both - the seamless field of reference mentioned just now. This led Jung to say in a letter that 'the living mystery of life is always hidden between Two' (Jaft, 1979). Or, put another way, the soul (says Jung) 'is the very essence of relationship' (CW16, para.504).

Countertransference and politics

The title of this section is a bit enigmatic, so I will give my main argument in a nutshell. Psychotherapists and analysts have in their possession a precious attribute of which they may themselves be unaware, something that would deepen and enhance our idea of the political. I am referring to the evolving body of clinical knowledge and practice that I have been describing in the previous sections concerning the countertransference. I mean especially the clinical valuing of a practitioner's subjectivity as a royal road to the client's psychic reality. Now I am going to detach the countertransference and theorising about it from its clinical moorings and insert this professional jewel in a different setting: in the world of politics. I am going to politicise the countertransference. By so doing, I will reframe and revision clinical practice: as a potential link between depth psychology and society and not as the source of an isolation of depth psychology from society (which is how critics of depth psychology usually depict its clinical project). The clinical can be a bridge to a new way to express and theorise political dissent. It will be a radical version of the clinical. Deconstruction of the opposition between the disciplines of depth psychology and politics leads to the advocacy of their occasional hybridisation.

I hope to indicate a practical contribution that depth psychology can make to working through, in a positive but critical spirit, the insight of contemporary feminism that the personal is also political. That insight supports a political valuing of a citizen's subjectivity as a royal road to the culture's social reality. I want to underscore the analogy I have made: in the world of the consulting room, as we have seen, the move is from the analyst's subjectivity to an understanding of the client's psychic reality; in the world of politics, the move is from the citizen's subjectivity to an understanding of the culture's social reality. We can take a sentence from a clinical text like this one of Christopher Bollas's (1987, p.208) and rewrite it in more political terms: 'It is essential to find some way to put forward for analytic investigation that which is occurring in the analyst as a purely subjective and private experience.' It becomes: 'It is essential to find some way to put forward for political investigation that which is occurring in the citizen as a purely subjective and private experience.'

Several art and literary critics have referred explicitly to providing therapy for an art work or text (Kuhns, 1983; Spitz, 1985). Some historians also seem to regard themselves as offering therapy to their topics of interest (Figlio, 1988). And the imagery of psychotherapy already permeates the environmental movement (ecopsychology). So it is not absolutely necessary to have a client in human form in order to do psychotherapy and analysis. It seems clear that one cannot simply evacuate the clinical element from so-called academic depth psychology. The clinical is the distinguishing feature of depth psychology. As John Forrester puts it, 'the conceptual system of transference-countertransference is built around the questions: What is an analyst? What is his or her desire?' (Forrester, 1990, p.240).

I want to relocate the very idea of countertransference so that it lies between clinical analysis and political analysis. For instance, I would say that, just as in clinical analysis, in political analysis the analyst's bodily reactions are an important part of the picture: the body is an organ of information. Bodily reactions to the surface of modem life, its sounds, smells, textures and shapes; bodily reactions to the demands of modern life, its crush, bustle, hassle and artery-blocking stresses. Bodily reactions, worked on and distilled in ways familiar to the clinical analyst, lead the political analyst to the heart of the culture and its political problems. The body of the political analyst leads in a spontaneous political analysis.

Bodily reactions and an understanding of them are starting to figure in the clinical literature on countertransference. Can the body be an instrument of political analysis? If so, then it is to the 'wisdom' of the body that we must turn as one way of politicising what we know about countertransference. In existing political discourse, there is no psychologically valid account of how we can take fear, disgust, a sense of contamination, anger and all the rest of the somatic lexicon as indicators of our political judgments. It is up to depth psychologists to provide such an account, an account of the body as a discourse of power, even a record of power (especially in the case of the female body).

Though a body-based analysis of political themes and problems will take place spontaneously, it is nevertheless possible to sketch out three stages or rather levels of a somatic analysis of the political. First, a thorough exploration of the bodily state, both the body as a whole and its constituent parts. I think this requires practice and training and an atmosphere and setting that is friendly to the enterprise. Second, we have to learn the particular language of the body when it engages in political discourse. We need to focus, clarify, differentiate and describe the somatic vocabulary and the bodily imagery. Third, we would make explicit the implicit meanings of such imagery in an act of interpretation. I believe a start has been made on each of these three stages or levels within the relatively new discipline of dance movement therapy (Chodorow, 1991-1 K. Stanton, 1991; Wyman, 1991, personal communication).

I am arguing that analytic and psychotherapeutic method serves as a base for a form of political analysis, or approach to political problems, that goes far beyond the rationalistic limitations of much political theory. Political analysis that is infused with depth psychology is a way to make the personal political, highlighting the relationship between individual and society. Affect, bodily sensations, wild fantasy, are all reframed and re-evaluated as the tools of political analysis — just as, via our theorising about countertransference, they have been reframed and reevaluated as the tools of clinical analysis.

Up to now, having empathy with a political problem has been seen from the standpoint of conventional politics as having an 'emotional' reaction to the problem (and nothing kind is meant by the word emotional in this context). Being emotional about politics is too often seen as being biased, unreliable, 'unsound', and sometimes even as having a 'feminine' attitude to politics (again, nothing kind meant by feminine here). My position is that, by accepting the parallels with countertransference in clinical analysis, the realism and utility of a politics that incorporates a subjective (and maybe an irrational) enquiry is established.

There are many implications in the advocacy of a subjective politics, a politics over which hovers that charged word 'feminine'. A subjective politics is available to both sexes - as is an 'objective' politics - but this recognition needs to be coupled with a sense that one of the features of a subjective politics is to back up the necessity for women to find a collective voice in relation to a male-dominated social reality. A subjective politics, in which women may have a significant role, must surely mount its challenge to injustice and oppression in diverse ways according to personal, socioeconomic and other circumstances. This diversity lessens the chances of replacing one hegemony by another. Making a subjective politics enables us to look at how women are denied access to political power as well as working out how to marry subjectivity to political discourse. To paraphrase Juliet Mitchell, if femininity in politics is by definition subjective, feminism is the demand for the right to be subjective in politics (Mitchell, 1984, p. 117).

The 'masculine' cast of so-called objective political analysis may have its roots in the psychological need of children to move away from a dependent relationship with either mother or father or both. To help themselves achieve personal boundaries, some individuals tip over into a rather rigid attitude to the world with an accent on distance and precision. This comes through as political 'objectivity' and is experienced as incontrovertibly objective even when its objectivity is exposed by others as being a disguised subjectivity. There are many in politics with such an outlook which I see as having been adopted for identity-saving reasons and not as a rejection of the mother or of femininity (though it can look and has been theorised like that). The feeling of being politically objective imparts a bleak political strength. But those who continue to maintain their political objectivity are uncomfortable with feeling deeply involved in social and political problematics. They fear that muddled feelings will inevitably lead to a return to the parental corral. So politics can only be approached from outside, as it were, because staying outside avoids a merger with the parent/political problematic - a merger that is experienced as identity-threatening. Subjective politics will or will not come into practical being depending on whether the psychological seductions of political objectivity can be overcome.

A question is bound to be raised concerning the untrammelled use of subjectivity in political discourse. Does this not lead to undesirable mass hysterias, such as Nazism or racism, or to markedly populist leaders such as Mrs Thatcher? And you want more of this? As far as mass movements go, I think the exact opposite argument can be made: that they destroy rather than foster the space for subjectivity in politics, in that mass movements are hostile to whatever is peculiar to an individual subject and his or her psychological functioning.

Thinking of populist leaders, if one sees them as therapists of the world, then they resemble those guru-like therapists who approach their clients with assumptions as to what constitutes well-being and how to achieve it. We know that those kinds of therapists are not working out of countertransference at all, and nor are populist leaders like Mrs Thatcher. They are not responding to the client; they're imposing something upon the client out of their own systems of belief. just as guru-therapists often get good results in the very short term, so, too, populist leaders seem to offer quick solutions to political problems. But, in both instances, before very long the complexity and incorrigibility of psychological or political problems defeats these magical cures. You could say that the problem starts to resist a solution that does not arise from itself - its history, its distinguishing features, its needs, its goals, and so forth.

Subjectivity and the politics of the sublime

I believe that we can make an explicit link between how therapists and analysts actually work and what is needed in today's political world. My belief is that developing a psychological take on politics is not just an issue for the educated, chattering classes or for New Agers. Many people want to know how they can translate their heartfelt emotional, imaginative and bodily responses to Bosnia, to ecological disaster, to homelessness, to poverty everywhere, into action. How can they begin to make use of their private reactions to public events? Could citizens become therapists of the world, citizens-as-therapists?

Closing the gap between private vision and public policy is almost the key background political issue of our times. It is -certainly something mainstream politicians should pay attention to. But how can we translate our passionately held political convictions - shall we call them political dreams? - into something that actually works on the ground?

Over the past few years, I have been running workshops and conferences on psychological approaches to politics in several countries. In this work and in my daily clinical practice I have concluded that people are much more 'political' than they thought they were. They know more about the political events of the day than they think they do - though this knowledge does not always take the form of a grasp of statistics or history. Gradually, participants discover that, all their lives, they have been living in a political world about which they had always been informed at some level. It has been fascinating hearing about people's first memories of political events, their first recognition that there is something one could call a political system, the first time that they had to face up to the fact that there are many competing ideas about how to run that system.

Similarly, what often emerges in these events is that people do have more and stronger political commitments than they knew about - a kind of 'repression' has been in operation. These commitments need time to emerge and are not always found by signing petitions, going on demonstrations, or voting.

These hidden, buried, silent sources of political wisdom lie in the private, secret 'countertransference' reactions everyone has to what is going on in the political world. Yet these private reactions have no ready outlet since they are all too often dismissed as 'subjective'. For example, at a workshop in New York, shortly after the Los Angeles riots in the 1990s, I asked a largely non-professional audience to dig up and record their emotional, fantasy, dream and physical responses to the riots. Unexpectedly just doing this in a contained setting had a cathartic effect. The participants said that they had often reacted in a bodily or other highly personal way to political events. But they feared these responses - would not pass muster in everyday political discourse. Their conception of politics fitted in with how our leaders would like us to define politics - as if it were an objective activity.

At another workshop in Santa Barbara, California, the group chose to work with the theme of 'Homelessness in America'. That is, as citizens as-therapists, they were confronted with a client called 'Homelessness in America'. The audience on this occasion contained several people with backgrounds and experience in housing and related social policy areas. One thing that emerged is how rarely we do feel 'at home'; homelessness is, in a way, the more 'normal' state. Yet in industrial cultures, the fixed and stable home is always regarded as 'where we start from', in T. S. Eliot's words.

The process of the workshop destabilised this assumption as the participants renormalised homelessness. As far as policy went, it was felt to be essential to provide for periods of homelessness by, for example, making it easier rather than more difficult to drop out of emergency accommodation or housing programmes. Moreover, swapping arrangements would be needed allowing nomadic citizens to use temporary shelters geographically distant from programmes with which they were registered. (Such arrangements do not presently exist, we were told.) Other practical proposals included free depositories for possessions and some kind of ride-sharing scheme. These ideas came out of discussions that followed the citizens-as-therapists segment of the workshop.

One other workshop on racism in Britain comes to mind. There were some specialists in race relations present. We started to get countertransference images of pristine environments, such as mountain tops, beaches, lakes, all places where there were not only no black people, there were no people at all. The group started to reflect on this collection of similar subjective responses to racism as a 'client'. The group became aware of something more profoundly anti-human in racism than they had been aware of before. Most of the group adhered to a standard psychodynamic explanation for racism. You put your bad bits, the bits you would like to eliminate, into another person or group, thereby cleaning yourself up. But we found that racists actually want to eliminate themselves - either as well, or as a primary wish.

It has been experiences like these that have led me to start to speak of the psychological citizen and of citizens-as-therapists. The aim has been to work out ways of exploring how things that are usually regarded as supremely private - early experiences in the family, dreams, fantasies, bodily sensations - may be reframed and turned into useful and even transformative political ends. Individual and society both benefit.

In the workshop, the group chooses a political theme on which they want to focus. They relax, maybe lie down, and pay attention to their breathing. One person acts as a scribe. The participants say whatever comes into their mind in relation to the political theme, thoughtful, playful or fantastical, and also do their best to concentrate on and verbalise any bodily reactions they are having in response to the political theme. They should not censor anything but say whatever it is that comes up regardless of its irreverence, irrelevance or lack of political correctness. The scribe tries to write all of this down. Then the results are scanned and anything that is obviously rational (no matter how seemingly right) gets discarded. What is left may or may not fall into strands of imagery or ideas. Either way, the group discusses what is left and see if there is a pattern. When they have done this, they then have an 'ordinary' discussion on the political theme they have chosen, paying attention to what the exercise has contributed in terms of a greater sense of empowerment to deal with the problem.

Notions of citizenship have changed quite dramatically over the past few thousand years. I think that what is emerging may be termed 'the politician within'. Similarly, the idea that citizens can (and do) approach the problems of the world in which they live as if they were its therapists and it was their client can be seen as a radical metaphor for a further shift in what we expect or imagine a citizen to be. One could say 'I am going to do my politics like an architect, acknowledging the need for foundations.' Or 'I am going to do my politics like an artist, seeking the image or phrase that opens up the door to a larger perspective.' Why should one not try to do politics like a therapist?

This will be a difficult idea to stay with because it rests on imaginative notions such as that political problems want to communicate with us, their potential therapists. The problems are talking to us, the street is talking to us, the housing crisis, the problem of unemployment, civil strife - all are talking to us. Like any therapist and his or her client, both sides of the relationship - citizen and political problem - very much inhabit the same world. Instead of regarding the citizen as the client, which is what often happens when psychologists discuss politics, we can make the radical step of regarding the citizen as the therapist. The citizen then accesses whatever power therapists have. Moreover, recasting the citizen as a therapist means that the citizen is entitled to use whatever therapists do use in relation to their clients. When we start to look at people's spontaneous reactions to politicians, political events or just to the nature of the political in modem societies, what we start to see is that there is a kind of tacit, private, secret political intelligence and wisdom at work. There is a narrative and a critique of the world locked up in people's personal experiences of it. That is what feminism taught us. But this whole point becomes greatly expanded when we add that there are images and experiences of the world that we do not know we are having or have had; these take us even deeper into the political psyche.

Concluding reflections

In this chapter, I have started to look at what depth psychology can contribute to an understanding of politics, working the field between the personal and the political. Depth psychology has always been interested in the world of politics and that the interest has burst into bloom in recent years as part of a more general attempt to resacralise and transform culture. The underlying fantasy is of providing a therapy for the world, and, if this is not taken too ponderously or concretely, the apparently inflated fantasy has considerable social utility. However, it is not in models of the psyche nor theories of development that the utility is found. Rather, it is clinical method in general, and the use of countertransference in particular, that depth psychology has to contribute to political discourse and to share with other disciplines. Countertransference theory is a validation of the subjective element when engaging with a particular political problem of theme. We need to pay attention, to the countertransference communications given off by any particular political problem or theme for, as with individual clients, the communications given off will vary Depth psychology can contribute towards a politics that has new ideas about managing the irrational creatively and, in so doing, depth psychology is true to its own roots and its knowledge that there are differing modes of consciousness. Russell Jacoby points out that the potential of depth psychology to frighten the institutions of an oppressive society has leached away: 'Over the years the ghost has become a ghost of itself' (1983, p-32).

I will end the paper by completely reversing its poles. Instead of merely suggesting that depth psychology offer its work on countertransference to the political world, let us also explicitly entertain the possibility that it is joint membership of, and participation in, a political order that makes the psychological experience of a countertransference reaction to the client possible in the first place. This is a political analysis that is intended to illumine the clinical process. Analyst and client are subject to the same repressive forces. There is no personal outside of the political; the political is itself a precondition for subjectivity. That is perhaps why there is so much politics in depth psychology, the profession of the subjective.

The work I have done on a pluralistic approach to depth psychology (1989) has convinced me that there is a benign form of the politics and practices of the profession. So often, the opponent contains or represents the missing bit of oneself or what is needed to round out one's own idea But what of possibly malign aspects of the politics and practices of depth psychology? If it is felt that the institutions and practices of depth psychology are technocratic and apolitical, how can they promote and contribute to a libertarian and progressive politics? I am not sure.

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