Psychotherapy—Between the Personal and the Political

Abstract

By now, the relationship between the therapeutic and the political will have become quite clear, both in terms of the influence of political forces on the individual, his or her identity and well-being, as well as on the theoretical level in so far as it concerns the relevance of political thinking to psychological-therapeutic activity. Still, the question remains of the nature of this relationship and how it can be conceptualized in such a way that both the differences and similarities between these domains are articulated, along with their zones of intersection. To approach this issue I will discuss three books written by psychotherapists for psychotherapists, books dedicated to the connections between the political and the personal: Philip Cushman’s Constructing the Self, Constructing America (Cushman 1995), Andrew Samuels’s The Political Psyche (Samuels 1993), and Michael White and David Epston’s Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1999).