This book is a psychoanalytic exploration of the need to know in Western culture, a need that is expressed by the relentless drive of science to get to the source of all phenomena. The profound reach into the interior of nature is accompanied by primitive unconscious phantasies of mastery, of knowing as making, of masculine intrusion into nature's creativity and of nature's retaliation and deterioration.
Science becomes a tool of domination and a suspect magical enterprise.
Benign nature becomes ominous and depleted. As a reult, the need to know becomes a moral quest, in which science unconsciously researches into the internal world of our intentions, 'externalised' into the world of the phenomena that it investigates. This book offers accessible, lucid and stimulating ideas on the links between the world of politics and the emotional life of citizens. Drawing on his experience as a political consultant as well as an acknowledged innovator in the fields of psychotherapy and psychology, Samuels develops trenchant and timely critiques of the crisis in contemporary politics. There are chapter on economics, nationalism, 'good-enough' leadership, the citizen and the state, women and men, fatherhood, and the citizen as a 'therapist of the world'.