'I can’t stop thinking about their faces,' says a distraught 44-year-old woman to her therapist as her weekly session begins. 'This morning, I passed a homeless woman and her daughter on the street. Where will they go? What if someone steals the money I gave them?'

It is a delicate moment for someone who has struggled with depression for more than a year. Many therapists would have quickly steered her away from the outer world of social suffering toward the innerscape of family complexes, but psychologist Lane Gerber of Seattle University encourages his client to confront the turbulent feelings stirred up by the street encounter. He explains that he considers her strong reaction to be just as meaningful as any emotional responses she might have to her parents or her children. During subsequent sessions, Gerber and the client explore the ties between the personal world and the political sphere. He points out the parallel between her frustration that no one ever listens to her and the homeless woman’s invisibility. But rather than just highlighting the symbolic similarities between her and the homeless woman, however, Gerber gives equal weight to the client’s concern for the plight of the homeless. This twin perspective helps bridge the gap between his client’s inner world and the wider role she must play as a citizen. Indeed, over time, Gerber says his client not only finds her individual voice but becomes a community activist for homeless people in her town.

Most psychologists (and their clients) assume that sociopolitical concerns should be checked at a therapist’s door. As one woman says, 'Why should I spend $100 an hour discussing welfare reform?' But Gerber and other 'political psychologists' believe this division is artificial and may even contribute to people’s feelings of loneliness and alienation—the very problems therapy so often seeks to cure. In a world beset by environmental destruction, ethnic strife, and economic injustice, the notion that personal suffering is related only to one’s childhood can seem naive.

Though people have been using psychological insight to understand political matters for some time, examining the political dimensions of pyschological well-being is less common. Andrew Samuels, a professor of analytical psychology at the University of Essex in England, notes: 'The way we [psychologists] are all trained is that if the client talks about the famine in Africa, you’re supposed to explore the depriving, absent breast—or something like that.'

It was during the Persian Gulf War in 1991 that Samuels, author of Politics on the Couch (Other Press/Karnac, 2001), began changing the way he practices therapy. He noticed more patients bringing in war-inspired dreams, fantasies, and visceral reactions like disgust or fear. While some clients were using Saddam Hussein as a means to talk about their father, just as many 'were talking about their father when what they really wanted to talk about was Saddam Hussein,' he says.