Yet shame by itself, Gilligan continues, is not a sufficient condition for the exercise of violence. In order to construct a comprehensive account of violence, one must consider additional factors. From a developmental perspective, for example, a person who has been charmed but has not yet developed the capacity for other feeling states - such as love, empathy, guilt or simply the fear of retribution - is more likely to project feelings of humiliation outwards. As for the social determinants of violence, a similar result can be expected when a person lacks other means of earning respect, such as formal education, occupational skills, financial options, or even some standing within the community. It is these social factors that prove decisive in highly unequal societies such as South Africa, for, without personal resources of any kind, one does not need to have been shamed as a child - whether the medium was physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. As described in the previous section, a society can be sufficiently shaming all by itself for the affected individual to act out in horrific ways.

Perpetrators are so engulfed by their shame, “including over matters that are so trivial, that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them”. Shame envelopes shame: what appears to be ‘unprovoked’ violence is anything but that - and, as Gilligan reminds us, “[a] man only kills another when he is, as he sees it, fighting to save himself, his own self - when he feels he is in danger of experiencing… the ‘death of the self’”.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

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.

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.