In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

What is of immediate interest to me as a psychotherapist is that the dominant political trend of our time - identity politics - is profoundly psychological, being organised around the injured dignity of oppressed groups. Each group, that is, claims a misattunement between a felt group identity and an outer world that rejects it. For proponents of identity politics, therefore, the problem of dignity turns on a society that is pathologically invalidating. Human beings are first and foremost social beings, and when social formations compromise the dignity of marginalised groups as a matter of routine, the consequences are devastating, involving either self-hating shame or envious resentment.

This individualisation of trauma is typical of medical model thinking, but its unfortunate consequence is that our society is disinclined to regard the victims of structural violence as being the victims of trauma. Accordingly, the empathy we ordinarily show survivors of (individual) traumas is withheld from those who are victims of social trauma. It is no wonder, then, that we think nothing of confining offenders with the most traumatic social histories to the most traumatising places on earth.

Variables such as race, class and gender and regarded by the mainstream not as game-changers for intervention practices but as little more than demographic information. Critical social theory is not usually a part of training programmes, with the result that newer generations of psychotherapists have quite restricted, technique-oriented understanding of patients’ life problems.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.