Political energy is not the same as political power. Political energy means bringing imaginative creativity to bear on seemingly intractable problems, trying to solve them in ways that reflect concern for social Justice.

Andrew Samuels, Jungian analyst (Society of Analytical Psychology, London)

Published in Tikkun, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 28-30. His latest book, The Political Psyche, was reviewed in Tikkun, Nov/Dec 1994
Copyright 1994 Andrew Samuels. All rights reserved.

Political energy is not the same as political power. Political energy means bringing imaginative creativity to bear on seemingly intractable problems, trying to solve them in ways that reflect concern for social Justice. Imagine a computer graphic designed to show the location and quality of political energy in a country like the United States. The screen glows red in those places where political energy is to be found and pulsates in step with its intensity.

Where would we find bright, flashing red lights? In Washington, in the Congress, in the bureaucracy, in state capitals, in the military, in banks and factories? I doubt it. True, all of these are the traditional repositories of political power and, true, they still control the economic and other resources-such as information—that make a complex modern society tick. But political energy has left these places and gone elsewhere. Given the way it has become a dirty word in American public life, it is not surprising that "politics" has left home and gone out into the world to redefine itself and find other and new places to settle.

I am not advocating removing political energy from its moribund institutions. It is happening anyway. All one can do is to chronicle and struggle to comprehend what might be the most significant sociocultural shift to take place since the end of World War II. A striking feature of the past twenty years in modern societies like the United States, Britain, and Germany has been the spontaneous growth of new social and cultural networks. More and more people are now involved in such networks-increasingly aware that what they are doing may be regarded as political. The elasticity in our changing image of politics is not something done to politics by intellectuals, but rather something the very idea of politics seems actively to embrace.

These new social movements operate in isolation from each other, seeming to have quite different agendas and programs. Because they form no alliance or coalition, they can only show up on our computer graphic as little dots, scattered across the country. Yet their collective illumination, if we could garner it, measure it—and do it without damaging what might be going on-may be just what Western societies, starved of creativity and imagination in their politics, crave and need as we stumble toward the end of the century.

Furthermore, these disparate social movements have something psychological in common. They share in an emotional rejection of big politics, its pomposity and self-interest, its mendacity and complacency. They share a philosophy or set of values based on ideas of living an intelligible and purposeful life in spite of the massive social forces that mitigate against intelligibility and purpose. They share a commitment to a transformation of politics, something I call the "resacralization" of politics. "Sacral" means holy, and the idea is to pick up on the attempt to get a sense of purpose, decency, and aspiration back into political culture. I believe this is what Michael Lerner has in mind with his "politics of meaning." Even if such a state of affairs never really existed, we behave and think as though it did-hence resacralization. Political reformers and resacralizers share a disgust with present politics and politicians—sometimes it is literal disgust, the gagging reflex, an ancient part of the nervous system, absolutely necessary for survival in a world full of toxins.

But such people have not abandoned politics altogether. They have joined movements that include environmentalism, demands for the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, animal liberation, complementary medicine including spiritual and religious groups including paganism and neopaganism, rock and other kinds of music and art, finding God in the new physics, sports, organic farming, and the pursuit of alternative lifestyles generally. The membership of these movements runs into the millions, far more than are actively involved with the great political parties. In Britain there are more people in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than in all the parties put together. Every now and then a political party (the Democrats in the United States, the Liberals in Britain) will try to harness the rainbow energy in these resacralizing movements and turn it into votes. But when formal political parties try to assimilate the resacralizers, incompatibilities of style and goals usually lead to acrimony and disillusionment. In recent years, I have often wondered what would happen if the resacralizers started conversations among themselves leading at least to the formation of a coalition and maybe later to a party of their own.

Let me be the first to say that this is not going to happen in a simple and speedy way. To begin with, many would dispute that the cumulative public significance of these developments is positive. Critics argue that the proliferation of new networks and cultural practices is merely a symptom of social malaise—a selfish retreat into individual preoccupations, reflecting an abandonment of the aspiration to truly political values. Moreover—and it is a good argument—reactionary fundamentalist religious movements can also be seen as resacralizing. But the phenomenon of religious fundamentalism also highlights the vastness of the potential energy pool for urgently needed political reforms.

It often seems amazing to me how little Progressives in the United States have managed to learn from those on the Religious Right. I am not saying it would be desirable to share their moralistic and simplistic approaches. But it would be worthwhile trying to figure out what it is that such politicians have heard in the yearning of so many Americans. It would be tragic if the most psychologically minded politicians were to turn out to be the leaders of the Religious Right.

Words like "spirituality" are politically neutral. The harnessing of spiritual passion and energy for politics is not in itself bound to lead to conservative outcomes. In fact, history tells us how radical religions have been over time, whether in promoting the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, or as a source for socialist ideas, or of important principles such as passive resistance and nonviolence.

I believe we should read resacralization positively as a healthy complement to the rapid decline of public identification with orthodox political institutions. In fact, if there is a future for formal politics, it may be dependent on what happens to today's attempts at political resacralization and transformation. These resacralizing movements carry the seeds of new forms of politics that jibe with modern, culturally diverse societies, forms which would indeed imply a transformation of politics or at least of what constitutes political activity.

It is more important than ever to renegotiate what can be meant by politics so we can engage with issues of empowerment and disempowerment in a more psychological way. In the late modern or postmortem Western world, politics and questions of psychological identity are linked as never before. This is because of myriad other interminglings: ethnic, socioeconomic, national. The whole picture is made more dense by the exciting and rapid course of events in the realms of gender and sexuality.

Feminism introduced us to this new kind of politics—a feeling level, subjective politics that encompasses a crucial interplay between the public and the private dimensions of power. For political power is also manifested in family organization, gender and race relations, in connections between wealth and health, in control of processes of information and representation, and in religious and artistic assumptions.

There is a role for psychology and the psychotherapies in a transformed politics based on a search for intelligibility and purpose in social life, a search that is implicitly and sometimes explicitly spiritual and transpersonal in tone.

People of diverse political persuasions have to face the possibility that the citizenry might lose their grasp on the political altogether if they do not themselves reclaim it from the media and the pundits. It is not that the media and their star columnists or presenters ignore psychology altogether. They certainly use a form of psychology. My concern is that a false dialogue has been started between psychology and politics in which we all join in a wild analysis of our politicians in a desperate search for the one with personal stability and integrity. It is a search that usually ends up with the provision of a single-strand nostrum for political ills. Recently, Americans have seen "virtue" or "virtues" advanced as the certain cures for complex and multifaceted problems. Having visited the United States many times, I have formed the impression that many Americans do not actually believe in the simplistic certitudes they find in the books they buy. But very little else is offered. There is a profound hunger for complexity in America these days, clamoring to be fed.

I am not completely uninterested in the relatively simple psychological motivations of politicians. But I am very interested in the much more complicated topic of what would happen to the political system were citizens to work on what I call their "political self-awareness." The starting point for an engagement of psychology with politics would be an exploration of the political experiences of citizens themselves. This could contribute to re-energizing the idea of citizenship.

The point on which I will conclude concerns what kind of politically self-aware citizen needs to emerge to make the vision of a transformation of politics into something more tangible. In a fragmenting society, rather than search desperately for a unifying myth, let's go with the idea of a fragmented citizen. This citizen has what we can call "political subpersonalities," including a whole area of feeling and behavior that I call "the politician within." In this area, the border between private and public is usefully blurred.

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