Living politics: psychotherapies and culture in a globalized world

Abstract

How can we open up a dialogue across generations that shares the experiences, memories and learnings of psychotherapy and sexual politics and ways these were lived in the libertarian politics of the 1970s? Exploring attempts at living politics and the attempts to create more equal relationships and engage critically with traditions of psychoanalysis and humanistic psychotherapies so that they could engage more directly with issues of class, race, gender and sexuality, I explore how concerns around masculinities proved vital in shaping new political imaginations. I go on to raise questions that might open up a dialogue across generations and so learn from the past so that different hopes can be created for the present. This means recognizing the prevalence of complex transnational identities produced through mass migrations that have helped shape multicultural cities and so call for different frameworks to understand relationships between the ‘psyche’ and the ‘social/political’ within a globalized world.