And just as therapist and patient must negotiate their hopes in dialectical conversation with one another, we, too, have to nurture between us the most fragile of cargoes, with the retaliation that what each of us does in our lives on a moment-to-moment basis will ripple through the ages. There has to be a revolt and a sincere engagement with it - failing which there can be no shared hopes, only selfish ones.

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.

This wound we call ‘apartheid’ will continue to be picked at compulsively. In both mind and practice, empathy has its limits; the relational pathologies of shame, envy and impasse are here to stay. The shame-filled violence, the envious value delusions and the ambivalent-avoidant attachments will persist long after we are gone. No matter the reparative attempts: there is a brokenness at the heart of our nation that cannot be wished away. If one considers the matter at the level of the individual, when the parent, teacher, or psychotherapist succeeds in providing optimal conditions for empathetic connection with a child, student or patient, it is hardly unusual for the latter to collapse the frame with enactments derived from still-active complexes.

And yet this enduring struggle to re-cognise one another should not be seen as doomed to hopeless failure: this is because our earnest striving for mutuality is not a promised land but a process evolving all the time. The task before us is a daunting one - first creating and then immersing ourselves in a stream of openings for psychotic recognition, all the while appreciating that each of us is a moving target, different each time at the moment of being found.

Recognition, therefore, is not a goal, but a struggle to sustain an emotionally meaningful contact with one’s own experience, and always in the context of the emotional experience of others.