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Entanglements: Weaving Our Futures

Authors: Simon Western

Price range: £20.69 through £31.99

Weaving the entangled threads of cultural upheavals and sociopolitical events with personal experience, Entanglements shines a light on soul, power, and unconscious desire. Simon Western offers illuminating insights into ways we might live well in a confusing world shaped by environmental, societal, and technological disruption.

Due to be published in May 2026

Authors

Simon Western
ISBN

9781800134546
Format

Paperback, e-Book, Print & e-Book
Page Extent

300
Publication Date

May 2026
Subject Areas

Organisational Psychology; Pyschoanalysis; Psychosocial Studies
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Description

Entanglements: Weaving Our Futures brings a fresh re-imagining of the challenges facing us in our disruptive age that provides rich and nourishing food for thought. At the heart of the book is the recognition that we live in a new Precarious-Interdependent Age (P-I Age). This calls for a radical shift in how we relate to ourselves, each other, and to our environment. Simon Western presents a score and more of short essays that each respond to a dislocating social or political event: Covid-19, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the rise of ‘woke’ culture and populism, the climate crisis, the meaning of monarchy, and much, much more. Western invites us to ‘look awry’ at the world, enabling us to observe the unconscious currents and symbolic meanings that shape collective experience and personal identity.

These evocative reflections with a psychoanalytic sensibility are grounded in lived experience. Drawing on his unique journey from factory floor to nursing, family therapy, academia, and organisational leadership, plus a stint as a stay-at-home father, Western bridges personal narrative with social critique. Themes of loss, care, power, desire, belonging, re-enchantment, and digital disruption are explored, always with the intention to provoke reflection and uncover possibilities for ethical and soulful ways of being.

Thus, Western does not deliver glib answers, pithy soundbites, or certainties. Rather, he accompanies those seeking to work through complex, messy, and entangled times with thoughtfulness and courage. 

About the author

About the author

Dr Simon Western is founder and CEO of the Eco-Leadership Institute, a global think tank advancing innovative leadership practices through action research, development programmes, and cultural change work. He works with diverse organisations including humanitarian NGOs, global manufacturing, finance and global technology companies. Simon’s work integrates theory and practice, drawing on psychoanalysis, critical and anarchist theory, theology, and social movement perspectives. His work transcends the university, and is grounded in extensive lived experience (see Chapter 1). He is the author of influential books including Leadership: A Critical Text (SAGE, 3rd edn) and Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text. Formerly, Simon led the Masters in Organisational Consultancy at the Tavistock Clinic and was Director of Coaching at Lancaster University Management School. A past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations (ISPSO), he has trained over 600 coaches worldwide in his research-based Eco-Leadership Coaching System. He writes regularly on Substack and hosts the popular Edgy Ideas podcast, both focusing on what it means to live a good life and to create the good society.

 

 

Contents

Contents

Table of Contents

About the author

Introduction

  1. What authored the author?

Part I: Dislocating events

Introduction to Part I

  1. Lockdown: In praise of the thermos flask
  2. The Covid event: Revealing new truths
  3. Taking a stance on the Ukrainian war
  4. What canst thou say? Israel and Palestine
  5. The meaning of the monarchy
  6. Brexit: The politics of enjoying displeasure
  7. The meaning of Trump 

Part II: Rising tides

Introduction to Part II

  1. The meaning of Greta
  2. The rise of woke
  3. The politics of dissonance
  4. The wounded-self and celebrated-self
  5. What is your true desire?
  6. ‘Helpless helping’
  7. Free yourself from the happiness imperative
  8. Enjoy your limitations!
  9. Staying with the trouble: Psychosocial insights into working with diversity issues
  10. Space invaders
  11. The network society is a disruptive society
  12. The making and unmaking of borders
  13. Presence and absence: Melancholia and confusion in the digital age
  14. Networks of desire and NIPI
  15. The monastery: Moments of grace
  16. Seasonal awakening
  17. Everyday spirituality

Part III: Weaving our futures

Introduction to Part III

  1. Living well in the Precarious-Interdependent Age
  2. Island contemplations

Afterword, July 2025

Notes

Index

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