As I thought about the general psychology of violence and protest in our country - in relation to both my clinical work and the particular milieu of my academic life - one word seemed to capture it all: alienation. Whether in relation to the state, communities, institutions, working environments, families, spouses - even one’s sense of self - it appeared to me that South African protestors were raging against an abiding disconnect between internal desire and external reality, or a state of alienation written into both the objective conditions of life in the external world, as well as their internal, subjective experiences of that world.

There is a great deal more to be said about Jameson’s reading of psychoanalysis, but for our purposes, the basic point is this: alienation encompasses the wholesale “fragmentation of the world as well as our perceptions of it”.

Accordingly, the chapter explains why the sick behaviour of individuals can be a reflection not of chemical imbalances or dysfunctional childhoods, but of the degree of sickness prevailing in any given society. It argues further that the negation of universal human needs such as creativity, sociality and autonomy generates alienation in its technical sense, giving rise in turn to all manner of relational disturbances. The chapter maintains that the cultivation of hope, which, like all other emotions can be approached intersubjectively, depends on our capacity for recognising and responding to the psychological and material needs of our fellow South Africans.

No matter their theoretical orientation, when psychotherapists receive therapists with warmth and humanness, it is aimed at restoring a sense of connectedness and, by extension, faith in the human family. To have this basic intuition of one’s relatedness to other people - however tenuous - is to know on an almost visceral level what it means to be human.

Yet, when we reflect on the previous chapters, each of the core concepts - shame, envy and impasse - stand for a psychological state, or emotion, that involves a pathology of relatedness. The shameful person cannot tolerate - let alone respect - their own wound, so they inflict wounds on others. The envious person cannot accept their dependency, so they destroy the only source of goodness in their life. And the person who finds themselves at an impasse is incapable of authentic human relating unless the relationship in question is defined by a degrading form of power. It is my submission that these are the dominant emotional tones of life in South Africa.

To foster an intersubjective milieu that both recognises and honours the inherent sociality of human beings is no simple feat, especially in violent societies where projection and withdrawal are the common psychological responses to perceptions of threat. Add to this mix the phenomenology of alienation - and a difficult task becomes a seemingly insurmountable one. Psychoanalyst Nina Coltart had something interesting to say about this, namely, the person who is interested only in getting better: “Psychoanalytical therapy has nothing to offer a patient who only wishes to be relieved of his suffering.