My theme is the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on the psychology of non-violent political change. But what is meant by "politics"? I mean the arrangements and struggles within a single society, or between the countries of the world, for the organization and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power.

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

First published in International Minds
Copyright 1994 Andrew Samuels. All rights reserved.

My theme is the depth psychology of political processes, focusing on the psychology of non-violent political change. But what is meant by "politics"? I mean the arrangements and struggles within a single society, or between the countries of the world, for the organization and distribution of resources and power, especially economic power. This kind of power includes control of processes of information and representation, as well as the use of physical force and possession of vital resources such as food, water, land, or oil.

On a more personal level, political power is reflected in the ability to choose freely whether to act and what action to take in a given situation.

Crucially, politics also refers to the interplay between these personal and public dimensions of power, for there is a connection between power as expressed on the domestic, private level and economic power. This articulation is demonstrated in family organization, gender and race relations, and in religious and artistic assumptions as these affect the lives of individuals.

Where the public and private, the political and the personal, intersect, there is a special role for depth psychology. Working out the detail of this role involves us in challenging the boundaries that are conventionally accepted to exist between the external world and the internal world, between life and reflection, between doing and being, between politics and psychology, between public and private, between the political development of the individual and the psychological development of the individual, between the fantasies of the political world and the politics of the fantasy world.

It has never been more difficult to make a psychological analysis of political process for, in our day, every element in culture is undergoing fragmentation and Balkanization. It has become harder and harder to see what political arrangements do hold culture together.

Still, people have risen to the challenge of these anxiety-provoking ideas. Our sense of fragmentation, fracture, and complexity seems to be of the healing as well as the wounding possibilities of political and social empowerment. For in the midst of the tragic anomie and baffling atomization; the dreadful conformism of "international" architecture, telecommunications and cuisine; the sense of oppression and fear of a horrific future; in the midst of war itself, there is occurring an equally fragmented, fractured, and complex attempt at what I call resacralization" of the culture. It seeks to reconnect to a feeling level of sacredness that we imagine once existed but that has vanished from the modem world (hence, resacralization.)

There are many surface signs of it: New Age thought, expressions of concern for the quality of life, environmentalism, demands for the rights of ethnic and sexual minorities, feminism, the human potential movement, liberation theology, finding God in the new physics. I would even include trying to engage depth psychology with politics on this list; I certainly do not want to leave myself out! In different forms, of course, resacralization is also a way to describe what has been happening in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. There, too, we see spontaneous movements that are surface signs that something politically transformative is going on.

In general terms, resacralization is our contemporary effort to shift a sense of holiness into the material world. That is why, for many, resacralization has indeed meant a frank return to religion. Sometimes this is established religion, sometimes it is archaic (or apparently archaic) religion.

As a depth psychologist, I have to approach resacralization in a psychological way. It is not enough for me to believe in or support these political movements (and many do not). But surely we should try to pick up on the psychology of what is going on. The idea—really it is akin to the analytical attitude—is to bring something up and out that is already there. (These words of mine are intended to be description, chronicle and analysis, not sermon or advocacy.)

My overall personal view is that these developments are extremely important and worthwhile. They seem to me to contain within them elements that could help to resolve some of our most vexing dilemmas. But I also think they are at serious risk of failing.

In my view, resacralization will fail, not only because of the reactionary moves of patriarchal capitalists, but because of a certain something lacking in the kind of energies typically involved in resacralization. To be specific, resacralization seems to be characterized by an attempt to construct a shadow-free politics. This is to be achieved by locating the shadow elsewhere—in men, in whites, in the market, and so forth. Then the fantasies of an apocalyptic end, whether by nuclear conflagration, AIDS pandemic, or the greenhouse effect, can be understood as attempts to shift a sense of self-blame onto other people and institutions.

We are so full of self-punishing contempt for ourselves, so full of disgust for the culture in whose making we have participated, that we (I mean we resacralizers) opt for a thin, purist, over-clean style of making politics. We are so anxious not to be contaminated by the shadow that we don't really want to see our cherished ideals translated into pragmatic politics. Even when the resacralizers do get involved in politics, it is a half-hearted involvement, psychologically speaking, characterized by a fear of getting dirty hands.

Role of the Shadow

Is there another way to carry our political dreams through into practical reality? And what is the role of the shadow in this? To answer these questions, a thinker like Nicollo Machiavelli is important, precisely because he does not resemble a modem resacralizer. There's no transpersonal ecology in Machiavelli, no upbeat spiritual optimism about the unity of the world, not a lot of femininity or feminine consciousness. He's a meat-eater; no vegetarian, he. What there is in Machiavelli is the kind of bleak realism and sense of civic duty that sees things through. If resacralization could only tap into Machiavellian energies, we'd really be on the way.

In Machiavelli's short book The Prince, written in 1513-14, we find a psychological analysis of the political process. Machiavelli blends wanton subversiveness, subtly buried morality, and relentless imagination. It is possible for those of us active in resacralization to encounter Machiavelli's encounter with the political culture of his time, seeing "the prince" as a metaphor for a certain kind of political psychology, or psychological politics.

We can make psychology in a Machiavellian way, learn to think Machiavellian thoughts and to see with a Machiavellian eye. The opprobrium heaped on Machiavelli's head for nearly five hundred years is also something to muse about. Depth psychologists such as Freud or Jung also stir up similar reactions.

They bring their psychological theories to bear on the political scene. As with Machiavelli's writings, what depth psychologists have to say often appears to subvert every generally held decency.

In The Prince, Machiavelli completely rejects the four cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, justice, and moderation. In MachiaveIli's words (quoted from the George Bull translation, chap. 18):

So, as a prince is forced to know how to act like a beast, he must learn from the fox and the lion; because the lion is defenseless against traps and a fox is defenseless against wolves. Therefore one must be a fox in order to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten off wolves. Those who simply act like lions are stupid.... Those who have known best how to imitate the fox have come off best. But one must know how to color one's actions and to be a great liar and deceiver.

In spite of statements like this, a conception of morality is not missing from Machiavelli's outlook. The prince's morality must, above all, be of a flexible nature; he is required to choose to be evil, to be evil in spite of himself: "He should not deviate from what is good, if that is possible, but he should know how to do evil, if that is necessary." Simply being ruthless or corrupt is clearly not what being "Machiavellian" means. It is far deeper than that. Machiavellian morality—political morality—involves a ceaseless interweave and dynamic between a passionately expressed, codified, legally sanctioned set of principles and certitudes, and a more open, flexible, improvised, tolerant kind of morality that is basically code-free. These two aspects of morality are going to be present in any political system, and it is important to resist the temptation to see one of them as somehow more advanced, arising from the ashes of the other.

If a resacralizer becomes Machiavellian, it does not mean the denial of morality or the abandonment of conscience. Machiavellians do not deny the existence of moral certitudes or absolutes but—paradoxically—what is certain or absolute varies according to context. There is more than one fundamental Truth because, in moral process, exceptions are the rule. Political morality, played in a Machiavellian key, helps to avoid a false and oversimple dichotomy between ethical behavior conducted according to rules and ethical behavior that is responsive to the nuances of a given situation.

There's a saying about this in a book called The Tao of Politics: "The reason why one does not wear a leather coat in summer is not to spare the coat but because it is too warm. The reason why one does not use a fan in winter is not disdain for fans but because it is too cool." (The Tao of Politics: Lessons of the Masters of Husinan, Thomas Cleary, trans.)

In psychological language, what Machiavelli is doing, and what I'd like resacralizers to do, is to make a morality, and then an ideology, out of the shadow, out of those aspects of human psychology that we would rather disown. Most political theory seeks to combat and deal with the shadow. Machiavelli's approach is to embrace the shadow and go with its undeniably effective energies, rather than against them. Why, as General Booth of the Salvation Army asked, should the devil have all the good tunes? Those of us involved in depth psychology need to struggle towards a new psychological valuing of the potential of political engagement itself. Involvement in the external world and passionate political commitment are as psychologically valuable, and no more shadow-y, than an interior perspective. Involvement in politics can certainly be a means of avoiding personal conflicts or acting out such conflicts ("projection of the shadow", 11 possession by the shadow"). But political involvement can surely also be a means of expressing what is best in humans, acknowledging the fact of our social being, that we are not the isolated, solipsistic monads that some psychological theories might lead us to believe we are. We know, as the feminist adage puts it, that the personal is political, that subjectivity can—and should—form a part of political discourse.

New Models

A more evolved attitude toward politics (one that goes with shadow energies and not against them) is something to work on in the office or consulting room, just as we work on more evolved attitudes to spirituality, sexuality and aggression. Analysts (and patients, too?) might begin to work out models that enable us to refer to a person's level of political development, to a political drive, to a political level of the psyche. In clinical practice, such models would enable us to generate new readings of personal and collective political imagery. We may even find that there is a politics of imagery.

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