The Psychopolitics of Liberation:
Political Consciousness from a Jungian Perspective

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, March 2007, 224 pages, 6.1 x 9.2 inches.
Hardback, ISBN-10: 1403976333, ISBN-13: 978-1403976338, £42.50

This original book explains changes in the political consciousness of the oppressed, using the ideas of Albert Memmi, Paulo Freire, and Jungian psychology. The psychopolitical analysis of the autobiographies of four Native people, from Guatemala and Canada, reveals how they attained liberated consciousness and healed their psychic wounds, inflicted by oppression. Their lessons and Alschulers proposed public policies may be applicable to the oppressed in ethnically divided societies everywhere.

Lawrence Alschuler has achieved what had been thought to be virtually impossible. From an academic base as a political scientist, he has understood, digested, and then applied ideas from depth psychology to the treatment of pressing social and political issues of our time. - Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex. Author of The Political Psyche and Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life.

This is not just a theoretical book on the politics of psychology or the psychology of politics. Rather, The Psychopolitics of Liberation is about how real people, suffering from social wounds, achieved liberation. This book is about the future of psychology and politics. - Arnold Mindell, author of Sitting in the Fire and The Deep Democracy of Open Forums

Lawrence Alschuler has achieved what had been thought to be virtually impossible. From an academic base as a political scientist, he has understood, digested, and then applied ideas from depth psychology to the treatment of pressing social and political issues of our time. - Andrew Samuels, Professor of Analytical Psychology, University of Essex, Author of The Political Psyche and Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life.

Contents

• Foreword by Andrew Samuels
• Introduction
• PART I: THEORIES OF POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
• Conscientization and Individuation
• Humanization and the Complexes
• Decolonization and Narcissism
• Liberated Consciousness and the Tension of Opposites
• PART II: CASES OF LIBERATED CONSCIOUSNESS
• The Study of Liberated Consciousness in Ethnically Divided Societies
• Atanasio
• James Sewid
• Lee Maracle
• Rigoberta Mench
• Psychopolitical Healing

Lawrence Alschuler is retired Professor of Political Science, University of Ottawa, Canada. Fascinated by Jungian psychology, Alschuler interruptedhis political science career to study at the C. G. Jung Institute-Zurich for four years in the 1980s. His university teaching itinerary began in 1967 in Honolulu and passed through Zurich, Buenos Aires (Fulbright Professorship), and Ottawa. Along the way he authored Predicting Development, Dependency, and Conflict in Latin America and Multinationals and Maldevelopment: Alternative Development Strategies in Argentina, the Ivory Coast, and Korea; edited two books; and wrote numerous articles on Third World political economy. Now retired, Alschuler lives with his wife, an artist, in the Swiss Alps.