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.

Yeatsian Geometry

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosened upon the world.
Yeats.

“We need to open our eyes. There are over two million illegal immigrants bedding down in this state tonight! This state spent three billion dollars last year, on services for those people who have no right to be here in the first place. Three billion dollars! 400 million dollars just to lock up a bunch of illegal immigrant criminals… Our border policy’s a joke! So, is anybody surprised that south of the border, they’re laughing at us? Laughing at our laws?”

These are originally the words of Derek Vinyard, the Neo-Nazi protagonist of Tony Kaye’s cinematic masterpiece, American History X. The film tells the story of Derek Vinyard’s gradual realisation that the bigoted beliefs he has held for most of his adult life are mistaken. He then tries to prevent his little brother Danny from following in his footsteps and becoming embroiled in the race-related gang-violence that was rife in parts of the US in the 1990s. These words were terrifyingly more recently used by Donald Trump at one of his election rallies.

The film is over 19 years old yet its themes couldn’t be more relevant to our current political climate. We only have to look at the Brexit’s rabble-rousing rhetoric to see how closely related these sentiments are to the type of white supremacist vitriol that Vinyard preaches during the film.

We are now witnessing the highest levels of movement on record. About 258 million people, or one in every 30, were living outside their country of birth in 2017. A 2003 projection anticipated that by 2050, there would be up to 230 million international migrants. The latest revised projection is that there will be 405 million international migrants by 2050.

The experience of moving from one country to another tends to increase the likelihood of the use of primitive defence mechanisms as a protection against the difficulties of everyday life and in relationships in the new country. The danger of this social development is an increase in the use of splitting and in the use of ‘psychic retreats’ in an attempt to uphold an idealised inner and outer world without pain or conflict.

Today, we live in an age of anxiety about ‘post-truth’ politics. ‘Fake news’, targeted messaging and seductive persuasion are rife. Digital technologies have created extraordinary new possibilities But many of our contemporary concerns about the new dark arts of political persuasion have a longer history. In the mid-20th century, psychologists’ curiosity and dismay about our susceptibility to manipulation and control crystallised. Their work offer us food for thought in a new age of economic development, population movement and populist fervour. In the 1940s, the psychotherapist Money-Kyrle was worried about the power of radio and other mass media to reveal and provoke our worst selves. In his essay, ‘A Psychological Analysis of the Causes of War’, he explores the roots of conflict

‘The study of cases of melancholia, paranoia, and homicidal mania helps us to recognize psychological mechanisms which are present, to some slight extent, in all of us. These mechanisms may not greatly influence us as individuals; but they sometimes have a great influence on us as members of a state.’

In the 21st century, he would have been looking at our use and the incredible power of the Internet.

Vinyard-esque remarks are now a part of the mainstream. Hostile, political rhetoric that’s used all too often as a part of our normal political process and so it seems the important message of American History X, that “hate is baggage” and that “life’s too short to be pissed off all the time”, has been forgotten by many. The politics of division are thriving across the world, and we will all suffer for it.