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.

Melancholia

The term melancholia has served many uses in literature and poetry. It is perhaps particularly useful as a semantic device in English language writing, where few nouns exist to describe a state of mind which is at once calm, fearful, despairing, restless, hollow, and longing for something inexpressible. In Von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011) he attempts to capture this set of emotions. In the film, Melancholia is the name of a rogue planet that crashes into earth, causing its destruction. The story depicts the lives and relationships of a handful of people in the lead-up to this Armageddon. It centres upon the sisters Justine and Claire, who are portrayed as each other’s conceptual opposites. We see Justine sink further and further into the throes depression whilst Claire tries harder and harder to care for her.

The three terms melancholy, melancholia, and depression have overlapped throughout history, and in a broad, general sense the use of the latter has grown increasingly popular as the former two have declined. This does not mean, however, that ‘depression’ has simply replaced melancholy and/or melancholia. That there exist such a vast number of different historical narratives about melancholia, melancholy, and depression is not simply a result of different perspectives among today’s historians. Rather, it is a testament to the vast and shifting meanings that these terms have possessed over time. When it comes to melancholia in particular, the word has been used at least since antiquity to describe illness, but not one uniform disease. Thus, rather than speaking about melancholia as a single concept, the word is best understood as corresponding to a number of different – though often overlapping concepts.

In psychoanalysis, Hanna Seagal describes melancholic depression as a defence mechanism devised by the body to fight the depressive state of the mind. This defence is known as manic-schizoid. Freud went further and was the first person to use melancholic to describe depression.

Freud compares the phenomenon of mourning after the loss and death of a close loved one to the idea of melancholia. Freud explains, they both share a similar outward affect on the subject and are both due to similar environmental influences. The inhibition, “absorbedness” of the ego, and the disinterest in the external world is evident in both, mourning and melancholia equally.

Despite their similarities, Freud states, there are some fundamental differences; mourning is recognized as a healthy and normal process that is necessary for the recovery of the loss and would not be seen as a pathology nor a need for medical intervention. However, melancholia, is an abnormal pathology, and a dangerous illness due to its suicidal tendency. In ‘healthy’ mourning we slowly detach ourselves from our loss whether that be through death or heartache, in melancholia we attach ourselves to it, creating the empty space within our psyches. Crucially with melancholia, it is the impasse that is created in the impossibility of expressing the true extent of the feeling that overwhelms. In melancholia the capacity to link the thoughts with words that provide catharsis has been lost. The purpose and rituals that we adopt to find meaning lose significance and no longer provide a symbolic capacity to hold our mental and physical selves together. We can see the depiction of this in the film ‘Melancholia’ as the lead characters depression stems from her inability to seek comfort and relevance in the ritualistic behaviours that humans engage in. She becomes more and more absorbed by the meaningless and insincerity of life, loosing the capacity to find the words to connect her feelings to those around her, there is an absence of inherent value both in her self and in living. However, as Justine begins to accept the inevitability of utter sorrow and unhappiness, the sense of longing melancholia produces is so great that it is concurrently painful and sweet as it provides the possibility of escape.

While many of us will have never experienced melancholia to the depth that Justine exhibits it, we can understand her emotions in part by drawing on what we may have experienced of sadness and longing. The film demonstrates that emotion doesn’t have to be rational to be true. In fact, it speaks to the idea that emotion is never rational, but, in contrast to the cultural view, it is not necessarily bad for emotion to be irrational. We can find a kind of optimism in the peace that Justine is ultimately able to find in her melancholia. In the words of the philosopher Slavoj Žižek:

‘If you really want to do something good for society, if you want to avoid all totalitarian threats and so on… accepting that at some day everything will finish, that at any point the end may be near. I think that, quite on the contrary of what may appear, this can be a deep experience which pushes you to strengthen ethical activity.” The result is not fatalistic hedonism, but a kind of profound engagement with the meaning and significance of life’.