ABSTRACT
We write this chapter at a time in which political and psychological contexts are characterised, on a global scale, by conflict and change. Old orders are giving way as old and new conflicts emerge, often with bloody and tragic consequences. Many peoples, particularly in Eastern Europe, are dealing with rapidly changing and emerging societies that are as yet unable to establish new order, to operate and to grasp the reality of unemployment, poverty, consumerism (and other free-market commodities, such as pornography). The increase in violence and the false gods of nationalism and racism may be some reflection and acting out of the intrapsychic pain people experience in their extrapsychic new worlds. The apparent passion for destructiveness can be understood politically and sociologically in terms of alienation, anomie and divisiveness; and psychologically in terms of splitting. Such theories describe experiences which are inextricably bound up with both political and personal struggles in the world. At the same time as societies, communities, organisations, groups, families and individuals appear to be concerned with division and subdivision and smaller and smaller identifications, there are also a number of moves to negotiate how people come together in different forms of economic, political and psychological union. Alongside the horror and terror of war and conflict, there is also great excitement and potential in the changes we have witnessed in the world in recent years – perhaps exemplified in the actuality and the metaphor of the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.
