Should your therapist have an interest in politics?

The question of whether therapists should engage with politics has grown more urgent in recent years. The world outside the consulting room has become louder, more divisive, and increasingly polarised. The rise of misinformation, the mainstreaming of extremist ideologies, and the deepening fractures in civic discourse have all conspired to push the boundaries of what we consider “political.” Inevitable, this environment seeps into the therapy room and into the words and silences of patients and the quiet reflections of therapists. To some, staying politically neutral in such a climate feels almost complicit. To others, stepping into political territory risks alienating the sacred space of therapy from its true purpose: to focus on the psyche, not the state.

Therapy is, by its nature, an intimate and private encounter. It is one of the last refuges from the noise of the world. People come to therapy not to hear their therapist’s worldview but to understand their own. The patient’s pain, conflict, or confusion must take center stage. Even the most well-meaning political commentary from a therapist risks turning therapy into something didactic or morale. It may subtly push a patient toward compliance with the therapist’s values, rather than helping them excavate and inhabit their own. For some practitioners, this traditional boundary is sacrosanct: it ensures that the work remains rooted in the patient’s inner life, not in the fleeting urgencies of external events.

But to believe that politics can ever be fully excluded from therapy is, perhaps, naive. Politics is not confined to governments or elections; it is woven into the fabric of everyday life. A patient’s anxiety about their future may be entangled with economic insecurity. Their feelings about intimacy and identity may reflect the influence of systemic oppression. In such cases, to ignore the political dimensions of their experience risks misunderstanding the forces that shape their suffering. The therapeutic process may feel incomplete, even hollow, if it fails to acknowledge the patient’s lived reality in its entirety.

Yet, for therapists to directly engage with politics raises thorny questions. Whose politics? In a world where truths are contested and misinformation proliferates, what authority does a therapist have to declare what is real or right? The therapist’s role is not to guide a patient toward a particular ideology but to foster their capacity for self-awareness and independent thought. To impose a political narrative risks replicating the very dynamics of control and disempowerment that therapy seeks to undo.

If only….

The word envy comes from the Latin invidere: to look upon maliciously. It is to look at another’s good fortune grudgingly, the feeling of horror when we contemplate a colleagues advantages or the need to spitefully denigrate when we fear that others are getting more than their fair share and certainly more than us.

Melanie Klein’s view of envy highlights its destructive assault on anything that is admirable. ‘Envy is the angry feeling that another person possesses and enjoys something desirable – the envious impulse being to take it away or to spoil it’ (Klein, 1957: 181).

In psychological terms envy is a feeling or impulse, which in its destructive and spoiling qualities can be disastrous to the personality. Envy can inhibit development when deeply entrenched in the psyche and exerts a powerful influence on the whole personality.
The more we examine our own envy, the more we understand it, the less likely will be our need to use it against others. In therapy we might find a way to transform our envy into a vehicle that allows us to look deeper into ourselves. When we feel the raw force of envy we know that we are not settled in our minds and bodies and not fully accepting of who we are in both our beautiful and flawed ways.