Thank you for what you have done for the world already. Thank you for your brave and beautiful words, which, like all the best poetry or preaching, have revitalized our formerly despairing and paralyzed political hearts. Thank you-it is wonderful to be waking up and to begin to believe again that we can.
Washington and Perth, Australia, are geographically far apart. But every day since I discovered your speeches and books a few years ago, you have been very near, in my psychiatric consulting office, as I'm sure you've been to millions of other non-Americans who love America.
We love America for her energy, her creativity, her yet-unrealized possibilities, her contradictions and complexity. We love America for the dreams of equality and justice and happiness in the United States Constitution, and the glorious cacophonous jazz of American culture, improvising into the future. We far-flung lovers of America have been heartsore during the past eight years, impotent in our pain and rage as the neoconservative cabal set about to systematically destroy so much of American politics and society that is inspirational, decent, and compassionate. And then you came along and spoke to us all about renewing hope in our own action, in our own ability to re-make the world.
I'm sure you will understand that if I address you as psychotherapist-in-chief to the world, it is not at all belittling; psychological and political maturity require each other. There is a body politic, and that body has a mind-a mind and a heart and a spirit that need healing. I know you know that if you can help move America and the world toward creating more peace and justice, toward ecological sanity and reducing poverty, there will be less psychological pain-less madness and rage and despair in all of us. Your version of the political narrative is psychotherapy on a grand scale; and it is also the continuation of the ancient work of the prophets, of sages, and of spiritual leaders, some of them not long gone.
Please keep speaking to us of our better angels. Remind us, again and again, as you have done in all your speeches-and as all good therapists do-that we ourselves contain untapped potential and creativity, that we the people can collectively change reality. That we can be actors again in our own lives, not merely passively suffering in social, economic, and political situations that we are taught are the unchangeable structure of reality, but are actually formations to keep power and wealth in the hands of the few. The people who have flocked to your rallies have been deeply nourished by your reminding them that this political campaign is their hope, creativity, and courage made manifest, as well as yours. For decades, passivity and cynicism have acted as psychological defenses to protect us from the political responsibility that belongs to us, and from the pain of anticipated defeat. We will need to be reminded to be politically active over and over again, because for so long the idea of collective action has been made to seem naïve and idealistic foolishness. Tell us to be idealistic, and to live those ideals.
But don't allow us to make you a messiah or a father. You have resisted that valiantly so far, but there is a primal longing in us all to find in you the infinitely wise parent to whom we can look to simplify this difficult world, and to take the often-painful struggle to exercise responsibility away from us. We all have dreams of a father who will save us, even as we know somewhere in our hearts that we have to do it for ourselves. (You did, and I salute you for those inner battles and triumphs.) Yes, let us talk to you, let us feel listened to and understood. Yes, lead us toward where you hear the beating wings of our best angels, but don't let us do violence to ourselves and to your humanity by seeking in you a savior.
What has been perhaps the most deeply healing about your presence in the political and psychological world so far is your insistence that we can do it-that we can change, individually and collectively. You have given us back some of our power. Somehow you have shown Americans that collectively they are more powerful than they imagined. The energy released from this psychological New Deal will be powerful, wonderful, and yet messy-but alive and full of new expressions of the deepest and most noble aspirations of the human spirit. You have revitalized democracy. But don't let us off the hook for a second. Americans and the people of the entire world have much work to do to change the world-using the energies you have liberated in our hearts and minds by your audacious hopes.
Rebecca Adams is a psychiatrist and psychotherapist working in Perth, Australia.
