Andrew Samuels has long been one of the rare figures able to move fluently between analytic consulting room, political arena, and the public square. His new book, Reflecting Critically on the Political Psyche: Therapy, Testament and Trouble in Psychoanalysis and Jungian Analysis (Routledge, 2025), consolidates that vocation with a collection that is at once programmatic, retrospective, and provocatively future-oriented. Arranged in five parts—Culture, Politics, Therapy, Jungian, Clinic—the volume reads like a summation of several decades of work on what Samuels calls the “political psyche”, while also offering fresh arguments about training, pluralism, social justice, and the ethical demands of contemporary practice. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief retrospective note and many include experiential exercises, an unusual and welcome feature that invites readers to test claims against their own clinical and political experience. The opening section on culture sets the tone. Samuels begins (characteristically) by staging encounter and conflict rather than seeking premature reconciliation. An early essay revisits the liberal idealization of “the Other”, urging clinicians and citizens alike to interrogate the moral satisfactions that sometimes substitute for contact and responsibility. Elsewhere in the section, he takes up politically engaged art—appreciating its capacity to galvanize but warning against the therapist’s temptation to smuggle aesthetic identification into the consulting room as if it were clinical insight. The chapter on age and individuation, with its tart subtitle about “the delusion of maturity”, works as a miniature of the book’s wider method: Samuels punctures cherished self-descriptions in order to clear space for an ethics of uncertainty, one in which individuation cannot be quietly equated with seniority, status, or gravitas. Part II, “Politics”, contains some of the book’s most challenging material. Samuels’s discussion of the “rationality of political violence” will be difficult for some readers, precisely because it refuses both sentimental disavowal and voyeuristic fascination. His argument is not an apologia; rather, he asks analysts to recognize the symbolic, strategic, and affective logics that make violent action legible to its agents and communities, and to register how our own institutions and identities are entangled with these logics. This is joined by a frank appraisal of the limits of individual agency in “progressive politics”, where Samuels balances the desire to “make a difference” with a sober reading of systemic constraints. A further chapter on moving the “green agenda” out of the margins offers a psychologically literate account of climate communication, with attention to ambivalence, mourning, and the subtle resistances that flourish in well-meaning milieus. The cumulative effect is to relocate political feeling from the edges of clinical work to its very heart. The middle of the book turns toward the training and organization of psychotherapy. Samuels has been among the most forceful advocates for pluralism—pluralism not as watery eclecticism but as institutional form. The chapter “Pluralism and psychotherapy—what is a good training?” argues that a robust education requires deliberate exposure to incompatible premises and to conflict that is held (not resolved) within an ethically capacious container. He then sketches “fragments of a critical psychotherapy”, noting how socioeconomic conditions, fee structures, and professional hierarchies shape what can be thought and said in treatment. These pages, while polemical, are enlivened by clinical vignettes and practical suggestions, which make them useful to programme directors as much as to early-career clinicians. Part IV, the “Jungian” section, will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. Samuels offers a concise genealogy of political and clinical developments in analytical psychology since the early 1970s, mapping shifts in subjectivity, equality, and diversity both inside and outside the consulting room. He then attempts what he calls a “balance sheet” for Jungian analysis—an exercise in strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (a disarming nod to management jargon that he exploits to clarifying effect). The chapter on “Jung and ‘Africans’” revisits controversial terrain with rigour and candour, engaging Jung’s writings and their afterlives without either sanitizing or anathematizing. It exemplifies Samuels at his best: historically attentive, polemically lucid, and unwilling to accept that the choice is between devotion and denunciation. Finally, “Sinking like a stone” considers the relationship between activism, analysis, and the academy, asking whether institutional prestige helps or hinders the kind of uncomfortable thinking the times require. The final part, “Clinic”, returns to practice with urgency. “From sexual misconduct to social justice” addresses the persistence of abuses of power within therapeutic institutions and shows how these are not aberrations but consequences of unexamined transferences and organizational dynamics. The chapter on the “activist client”—a concept Samuels has developed over many years—presses clinicians to recognize political life as a legitimate, even central, object of analytic attention. Patients do not leave their civic selves at the waiting-room door, and the fantasy that therapists can do so is itself a political performance. The closing piece, “The transcendent function and politics: No!” is a puckish refusal to conscript Jung’s concept into noble-sounding reconciliation. Samuels insists that the wish for transcendence too easily anaesthetizes conflict; he calls instead for the discipline of staying in relation where positions remain incommensurable. A reviewer’s task is not only to describe but to discriminate. What, then, are the book’s distinctive contributions, and where does it raise further questions? First, the voice is singular. Samuels writes with a public intellectual’s ear and a clinician’s patience. The retrospective introductions that preface each chapter prevent the collection from feeling like a mere miscellany; they show how his thinking has shifted across contexts, interlocutors, and historical moments. The inclusion of exercises is more than a pedagogical nicety; it materializes a long-standing contention of his work: political theory without practice readily becomes moral ornament, while clinical theory without politics is conceptually stunted. In an era rife with performative righteousness and performative neutrality, this insistence on practice is refreshing. Second, the treatment of pluralism is unusually concrete. Many training programmes proclaim pluralism while reproducing monochrome canons and tacit orthodoxies. Samuels’s account identifies specific levers—curriculum architecture, assessment norms, faculty composition, epistemic hospitality—that can either entrench or mitigate homogeneity. His argument that true pluralism requires institutionalization (and not just individual openness) is likely to provoke resistance, not least because it exposes power where collegial sentiment often hides it. These chapters warrant wide discussion among accrediting bodies and institute leadership. Third, the engagement with violence and with “the political self” is courageous and, at times, deliberately uncomfortable. Some readers may wish for more extended clinical case material when Samuels treats the rationalities of violence, and others may want a more granular engagement with differing forms of violence (state, domestic, revolutionary). Yet he is clear that the clinical implications are inseparable from political analysis: our task is not to adjudicate “good” and “bad” violence from an imagined altitude, but to stay attentive to the psychic economies in which violent acts acquire meaning, and to the ways our own practices may collude in disavowal. The book is not without tensions. Because it spans culture, politics, training, Jungian debates, and clinical ethics, some chapters will inevitably feel closer to readers’ own preoccupations than others. At times the brisk pace sacrifices depth—for example, the climate chapter touches several psychological strategies but leaves policy complexities largely offstage. Similarly, the SWOT-style “balance sheet” for Jungian analysis, while clarifying, risks flattening heterogeneous global developments into a single evaluative grid. Still, these are productive constraints of a book that aims to be catalytic rather than definitive. Stylistically, Samuels retains his gift for the sharp phrase and the destabilizing juxtaposition. He quotes and reframes without pedantry, and he has a knack for exposing the unexamined virtues of our field: maturity, neutrality, transcendence, even care itself. More important, he models a form of criticism that is neither performatively iconoclastic nor blandly conciliatory. The test of analysis, he suggests, is not the absence of trouble but the capacity to work with it—hence the subtitle’s “trouble”, which threads through the whole. If therapy is to matter in a time of democratic fragility, ecological crisis, and proliferating identity conflicts, then it must risk proximity to the very forces that unsettle it. For readers of the Journal of Analytical Psychology, the book’s contribution is twofold. It offers a scrupulous updating of the “political psyche” that many of us have invoked without always specifying, and it takes a sober look at our own house—its strengths, blind spots, and prospects. Those who have followed Samuels’s work will recognize persistent themes—pluralism, citizenship, equality, the critique of heroic individuation—but will also find them re-articulated for a changed world and a changed profession. Those encountering him for the first time will find a rigorous introduction to a way of thinking that refuses the defensive split between personal and political life. In sum, Reflecting Critically on the Political Psyche is an important and bracing book. It should be read by clinicians across traditions, by supervisors and trainers responsible for the culture of our institutions, and by scholars tracking the evolving interface of psyche and polis. Samuels’s wager is that analysis can be both more worldly and more exacting than we often allow. This volume—testament, toolkit, and provocation—goes a long way towards showing how.
Stefano Carpani (Tue,) studied this question.