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This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and wellbeing, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich our understanding of these wider discussions. It therefore looks both inside and outside - indeed one of the main themes of The Political Self is that the conceptually discrete categories of 'inner' and 'outer' in reality constantly interact, shape, and inform each other. Severing these two worlds, it suggests, has led both to a devitalised and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of therapy and analysis.
List of contents
Foreword -- INTRODUCTION -- Insight -- Understanding the social context of individual distress -- Power in the therapeutic relationship -- Therapy in late capitalism -- The selfish society: the current state of things -- Divided brain, divided world -- Outsight -- Born to run: wounded leaders and boarding school survivors -- On Killing: the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society -- A tangled web: internet pornography, sexual addiction, and the erosion of attachment -- The corporation as a pathological institution -- We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy-And the World's Getting Worse -- APPENDIX Additional resources
About the author
Rod Tweedy is the editor for Karnac Books and the author of 'The God of the Left Hemisphere: Blake, Bolte Taylor and the Myth of Creation', a study of William Blake's works in the light of contemporary neuroscience. He has written a number of articles on the relationship between analysis and creativity, bihemispheric lateralization, Romanticism and popular culture, and the social and environmental contexts for individual distress. He is an active supporter of Veterans for Peace UK and the user-led mental health organisation, Mental Fight Club.
Summary
This book explores how our social and economic contexts profoundly affect our mental health and wellbeing, and how modern neuroscientific and psychodynamic research can both contribute to and enrich our understanding of these wider discussions. It therefore looks both inside and outside - indeed one of the main themes of The Political Self is that the conceptually discrete categories of 'inner' and 'outer' in reality constantly interact, shape, and inform each other. Severing these two worlds, it suggests, has led both to a devitalised and dissociated form of politics, and to a disengaged and disempowering form of therapy and analysis.
