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.
I'll begin by saying what I'm not writing about. I am not going to write about responsible ways of working with political or social or cultural or ecological material in the clinical session. I am not going to write about how a person gets his or her politics–the sources of their political attitudes and engagements.
One of the most potent criticisms of psychotherapy and analysis is that the client is encouraged or even required to turn away from external concerns such as political issues, and focus exclusively on the "inner world." This, it is argued, makes nonsense of the statement that therapy develops the whole person.
Politics in the West is experiencing a paradigm shift in which old definitions, assumptions and values are being transformed. While politics will always be about struggles for power and the control of resources, a new understanding of all that is political has evolved since feminism introduced the phrase 'the personal is political'.
In this paper feminist questions about an aspect of women's experience, namely aggressive fantasies, are framed in terms of psychoanalytic ideas. Elements of post-Jungian thought are then drawn into the discussion, re-casting psychoanalytic insights to produce a post-Jungian hermeneutic for reading women's aggressive fantasies.
