Dwelling in Relationship: Nurturing the Needed Capabilities for Setting up Humane Governance

Abstract

Interpersonal neurobiology indicates that reasoning and identity grow from the social self schema, itself internalised in the infant in response to the first social field. One could say the social field gives rise to the mind using the intermediary of the brain. The individual and the group are in a tight reciprocal relationship. Psychotherapy works at this interface, where the inner world interacts with the outer world, where power and choice are known personally, in direct relationships. This paper takes a wide‐ranging journey through core concepts of self, imagination, power, and choice, identifying the areas of work where psychotherapy can deeply impact on our institutional formulations and functioning. Companioning clients in the psychotherapeutic relationship builds resilience and resources in the face of difficulties and the unknown, develops fluidity, and encourages intimacy and the building of cooperative working relationships, thereby setting up the necessary conditions for a liberation of the politics of governance from dependency, passivity, and bureaucratic fixations into more humane‐based communities of being and action.