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Mary Watkins, Ph.D., is a professor at Pacifica Graduate Institute and co- founder of the Community Psychology, Liberation Psychology, and Ecopsychology Specialization in the M.A./Ph.D. Depth Psychology Program. 

Mary has generously provided Depth Psychology Alliance with a copy of her recent article entitled "The Social and Political Life of Shame in the U.S. Presidential Election 2016"

MARY WRITES:

I have I have been tracking how shame has been operating in the current presidential election. I o

Below is a link to an article I published in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies in 2011.

U.K.-based psychotherapist and activist, Andrew Samuels has a long history as a consultant to political clients on the presidential and prime ministerial level. While Samuels first published Politics on the Couch in 2001 and The Political Psyche in 2015, his newest book, A New Therapy for Politics? delves ever more deeply into the intersection between psychotherapy and politics and lends a critical eye to his own chosen profession in an effort to bring the two together.

Sigmund Freud and C. G. J

Excerpt from a powerful new post by Jungian analyst and climate scientist, Jeffrey T. Kiehl:

“If we are stumbling into an era of dictators, Caesars, and incarnated States, we have accomplished a cycle of two thousand years and the serpent has again met with its own tail. Then our era will be a near replica of the first centuries A.D., when Caesar was the State and a god, and divine sacrifices were made to Caesar while the temples of the gods crumbled away. You know that thousands in those days

Race and Religion; Race and Social Class

Meanwhile, four out of five white evangelicals, a quarter of the electorate, some thirty million people, voted for Trump – despite his serial adultery, his casinos, his shady deals, his narcissistic tantrums, his reality-TV clowning, his wife’s soft-porn photos, his palpable insincerity, his profoundly uncharitable threats and accusations, his obnoxious vulgarity, his disgusting misogyny and his gleeful ignorance of the Bible; despite his hinting that he’s

“Stripping and Flipping” — Voter Suppression and Computer Fraud

The Democrats were defeated because of their own insolent incompetence, because of our antiquated electoral college system and because race is still the dominant factor in American life. That said, Clinton won more than the popular vote, and by over two million. She almost certainly won the Electoral College as well.

To go deeper, we have to get apocalyptic (to lift the veil from our eyes) and understand the dark side of our electoral

It Can’t Happen Here

In pursuing what led to the Trump “victory” – yes, I’m putting that in quotes – we’re beginning to observe an ongoing conflict between two themes: Lesser of two evils vs Cognitive Dissonance. As for the first, it’s clear by now, with two astoundingly unpopular major candidates, that literally millions of people on both sides held their noses and chose the least unfavorable, the one whose promises overrode their perceived character. That’s a rational position, regardless of wh

Groping is a healthy thing to do. When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? –   Female Trump supporter.

 Race and Gender

I predicted during the Democratic primaries that

…Clinton will almost certainly win the nomination because she swept these states – none of which the Democrats have the slightest hope of winning in November. So her Southern support will prove to be crucial to her nomination but useless in the general election, where Republicans will continue to sweep the South…This bears repeati

What Carl Jung had to say about the leadership and characteristics of large groups of people would also seem to apply to social groups linked together by the Internet and bonded by religious causes such as Islamic Fundamentalism:

"There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man...since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical,