ABSTRACT
It is impossible to measure the influence that Andrew Samuels’ work and person have had on my own thinking, so I must content myself here to focus on just a few points of influence. While I have been politically ‘conscious’ since my college years, which coincided with resistance to the Vietnam War and with the beginnings of what came to be known as second wave feminism, once I turned from an academic career to clinical practice, it was not always very clear to me how I might bring my politically and my psychodynamically informed selves together. Many colleagues who are politically left argued with me that the clinic simply isn’t the place for politics, that what we do is of a different order, but my academic training had made all too clear the many ways that mainstream politics parade as the ‘non-political.’ So it has been with great relief and admiration that I have followed Andrew’s writings over the years. Andrew has not only taught us that therapists deal constantly with political material in sessions, but he has pried open for us the multiple ways one can think about the political. Equally important, he always teaches us new ways to access the political lives of our selves and our patients (most recently in his online discussion of Muriel Dimen’s paper on how money functions in the clinical setting, June 2008). Andrew is not afraid to say, look, here’s how you do it, here are the kinds of questions you can ask to learn about the political psyche and its development within relational matrices. This directness about how to access the political is an invaluable gift he has given to clinicians.
