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While politics will always be about getting things done, or stopping things from happening, most citizens know that there is usually a private, even a secret dimension to the ways in which their political beliefs, commitments, and actions have evolved in them.

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

Published in Tikkun, Vol. 10, No. 3, May/June 1995, pp. 93-95.
Copyright 1995 Andrew Samuels. All rights reserved.

While politics will always be about getting things done, or stopping things from happening, most citizens know that there is usually a private, even a secret dimension to the ways in which their political beliefs, commitments, and actions have evolved in them. We need a language in which to explore "the politician within," and at present we lack such a language. This exploration has to be conducted with respect and affection for the diversity of the politician within each citizen. I want to avoid creating another monolith, an "I" or "we" that won't survive in politics today.

What happens if we pay the kind of attention we give, in therapy, to the inner life of the individual to what might be called his or her "political selfhood?" We would be entering the realm of "self-awareness" and, because it is scarcely possible to give an objective history of one's politics, we should think instead in terms of the "political myth of the person."

Most often, psychological forays into the realm of politics have focused either on the psychology of the politicians-their character and likely behavior in stressful situations and crises—or have studied the voters to help politicians appeal to or manipulate them. There has not been very much psychological work done in relation to the citizen's experiences of and in politics.

A good deal of political debate boils down to disagreement about what constitutes human nature. After all, people have always spoken about politics and politicians in emotional terms. Why, then, are they so reluctant to turn to psychology and psychotherapy as sources for new political ideas to fill the current vacuum?

From the greed and envy highlighted by White water-gate to the sexual confusions of the Clarence Thomas hearings, politics presents us with unmistakably psychological issues. But in analyzing our reactions to these events, the media and the electorate fail to connect the inner, private levels of life with the outer, public levels.

In a new language to link psychology and politics, it will be more and more difficult to make universally true statements. We will want to know more about the bidden, personal agenda of the person who is speaking and acting.

Therapists know that everyone teems with inner people (sub-personalities), something that both therapists and clients find difficult to acknowledge—it is much easier and safer to take personality as something organized and unified. In the same way, we need an approach to politics that understands that no citizen has a single, unified political identity.

This is not only an issue for political strategists and pundits. Many people want to know how they can translate their emotional, imaginative, and bodily responses to Bosnia, to ecological disaster, to homelessness, into action. How can they begin to make use of their private reactions to public events?

Over the past few years, I have been running workshops and conferences in several countries on psychological approaches to politics. In this work, I have discovered that people are much more political than they believed. They know more about the political events of the day than they think they do. Gradually, participants discover that they have long been living in a political world about which they had always been informed. What often emerges is that people have more and stronger political commitments than they knew about. Such commitments need time to emerge; they are not always found by signing petitions, going to demonstrations, or voting.

These buried sources of political wisdom lie in the private reactions everyone has to political events. Yet these 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, I asked a largely nonprofessional audience to dig up and record their emotional, fantasy, 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 highly personal way to political events, But they feared these responses would not pass muster in everyday political discourse. Their conception of politics fit in with how our leaders would like us to define politics—as if it were an objective activity.

Jung told his students that "when you treat the individual you treat the culture." The interpenetration of individual and culture is the essential backdrop to discovering how things that are usually regarded as supremely private may be refrained so that their secret politics is laid bare. People cannot be seen in isolation from the society that played a part in forming them. Both individuals and society would benefit from such a shift in perspective.

Once we see that there is a politician within each of us who has developed over time, we can start to track the political history of a person-the way the political events of his or her lifetime have affected the forming of the individual's personality. So we have to consider the politics a person has, so to speak, inherited from his or her family, class, ethnic, religious, and national background—not forgetting the crucial variables of gender and sexual orientation.

The following exercises can help the reader to sharpen his or her political self-awareness by reflecting on what emerges.

Which of the following do you think has influenced your political views, commitments, and actions over the years? (Score the possibilities on a scale of one to ten, with one equaling "not a lot" and ten equaling "very greatly"):

  • your parents
  • other family members
  • other significant figures (teachers, ministers, national leaders, etc.)
  • your gender
  • your sexual orientation
  • socioeconomic factors
  • ethnic factors
  • religious factors
  • national background
  • a particular political event (specify which event as well as scoring it)

But all this is a bit too rational! Maybe there are also accidental, constitutional, fateful, and inexplicable elements in our political makeup. Maybe people are just born with different amounts and kinds of political energy in them, (I discussed this in "Political Energy," Tikkun, March/April 1995.)

If so, there would be significant implications for individuals and for our approach to politics. What happens if a person with a high level of political energy is born to parents with a low level (or vice versa)? What if the two parents have vastly different levels? What is the fate of a person with a high level of political energy born into an age that does not value such a high level? Did your parents foster or hinder the flowering of your political energy and your political potential? In which direction are your politics moving, and why? The answers to such questions shape not only the political person but the contemporary political scene. Yet I do not think these questions are presently on either a mainstream or an alternative political agenda.

This second exercise explores the reader's political energy level in relation to other levels:

On a scale of one to ten, score yourself for political energy. (One equals low political energy and ten equals high political energy.)

  • Score your father.
  • Score your mother.
  • Score your present closest person.
  • Score the community you grew up in.
  • Score the community you live in now.
  • Score the epoch in which you grew up.
  • Score the level of political energy in our times.

My interest is not in what might be called political maturity. No such universal exists in politics, given its adversarial nature, Ho Chi Minh was a hero for some and a demon for others. Many of Nelson Mandela's admirers once regarded him as a dangerous communist. In the United Kingdom, while government and opposition alike condemn the violent acts of the IRA, other commentators acknowledge that the bombing campaign on the mainland was politically effective. So the creation of a schema or hierarchy of political maturity is a dubious and hopeless task.

Instead, let's make it easier for citizens to assess themselves. My interest is in how people reflect upon where they are politically and, above all, in how they themselves think, feel, explain, and communicate about how they arrived there-this is what I mean by the political myth of the person. From one angle, it may often turn out that someone is not where he or she thought politically. Or they may have gotten there by a route of which they were unaware. As far as the politician within is concerned, this is not relevant, because there is a narrative truth to consider as well as a historical truth, a matter of meaning rather than a matter of fact.

I'll conclude by suggesting there is something else that needs to be addressed-what we could call "political style." For a variety of reasons, some of them to do with their personal backgrounds, some to do with their level of political energy, people will live out their political selves in different ways. Some will be violent terrorists; some pacifists. Some will want to consider ideas and arguments carefully; others will fly by the seat of their pants. Some will definitely enjoy cooperative activity; others will suffer the nightmares of trying to do things in a group only because they believe in the ends. As we begin to make a start on a psychologically driven transformation of politics, let us not make the mistake of insisting that everyone do it in precisely the same way. There is probably something desirable and creative in a diversity of political styles being equally valued and honored, and we can think of ways of protecting and privileging such diversity.

The final exercise concerns political style. First, answer the questions according to your current self-assessment. When you have done that, ask yourself what your ideal political style would be and record the answers to that question as well:

  • Do you feel more comfortable engaging in political activity, or do you tend to reflect on the great issues of the day?
  • When politics is the topic, do you have greater or lesser difficulty in speaking up than usual—or about the same?
  • Do you see yourself as good or bad at handling conflict in your life?
  • When it comes to political conflict, are you especially ill at ease?
  • Which of the following terms most accurately sums up your political style (feel free to choose more than one or to organize all the terms in an order of priority): warrior; terrorist; martyr; exhibitionist; leader; activist; parent; follower; child; victim; trickster; healer; analyst; negotiator; bridge builder; diplomat; philosopher; mystic; ostrich.

In each of these exercises, the goal is to pay the kind of attention to the individual's political selfhood that therapists pay to the individual's inner life. People who have done these exercises often tell me that they end up feeling more fragmented than ever—yet, strangely, more optimistic about today's politics. In other words, the exercises seem to work.

A fragmented society such as ours will no longer respond to an analysis that assumes homogeneity, order, cohesion, and a commonality of interest across the board. The politician within is thus a new kind of political analyst, capable of engaging with a fragmented society by virtue of being politically self-aware of his or her own fragmented political selfhood and evolving political myth.

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