Politics on the Couch: Citizenship and the Internal Life

Rating:
Summary: An intellectually dishonest, self-congratulatory work
Review: Samuels seems more interested in showing off how clever and subversive and radical he is than in solving any of the real problems of society and the poor. His proposals are neither deeply thought through nor in any way realistic, and he seems offensively unconscious of his underlying assumption that any reader will have hundreds of dollars to spend for a workshop where he gets to lie on the floor visualizing what it would be like to be homeless, or alternatively how it would feel to live in a world without racism. There is no sense of real concern for the plight of the unfortunate, only an endless preening of what he imagines are his own brilliant, subversive ideas (which are essentially just shallow and silly). A disappointing and infuriating book, a third-rate mind showing off for the (alas) fifth-rate minds who predominate among the Jungians.