ABSTRACT
Psychotherapists and analysts have always wanted to explore the social world and current events. It is not a new fad or fashion. Freud (1920) hoped to understand “the riddles of the world,” and Jung (1946) said that therapists “cannot avoid coming to grips with contemporary history.” But the world never really turned up for its first therapy session. Maybe the world knew what it was doing, because many attempts to link psychotherapy and social issues have tended to present everything as exclusively psychological, thereby keeping the therapist in control and above the fray. Attempts to put political leaders and other significant figures such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, or Princess Diana on the couch as patients have, quite rightly, been criticized and ridiculed.
