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.

This is why Jameson chooses Freudian psychoanalysis as another case study in fragmentation: the rise of psychoanalysis was bound up with the fragmentation of our psyches, which is itself a consequence of the relentless expansion of the capitalist project.

For Jameson, that is, the rationalisation of bourgeois society shattered the social collectivity, giving rise to a nuclear family that would come to occupy the boundary between the public and the private spheres. It is not by accident, therefore, that the entire collection of psychoanalytic dramas - childhood trauma, primal scene fantasies, the Oedipus complex - relied on the historically located institution of the bourgeois family. Indeed, psychoanalysis is completely dependent on the capitalist mode of production for its supply of patients: energies that were distributed over the entire social body came to be invested exclusively in the family, with calamitous outcomes. As cultural critic Michael Venture notes, “In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there’s nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs onto a relationship or expect them to be met by a family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.

There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.

This brings me to the psychoanalytic perspective and its major advantage over other approaches, namely, its ready acceptance that humans are motivated, for the most part, by factors far beyond their conscious awareness.

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.