In this unusual book of political psychology, based on the idea that we hold ourselves together through a combination of restraint and release, the author draws on psychoanalysis and its creative interpretations of everyday experience to consider the current malaise of politics in relation to the huge vitality of popular culture.

1. The popular disciplines of delight 2. The containing matrix of the social 3. The therapeutic culture hypothesis 4. Containment and compression: politics in the therapeutic age