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”.

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.

The wish for recovery, in other words, is not the same as the will to be analysed: among other things, psychological mindedness means working with the idea of an increase in self-knowledge generating relief from psychic pain. Similarly, in the much more formidable case of a nation on the couch, the prospect of psycho-social improvement begins with an act of faith - specifically, faith in the value of understanding. I am referring to a process of understanding that begins in the unlikeliest places: to understand where it all went wrong for human beings - not just South Africans - we have to go back to the start of civilisation, the start of violence, and the start of deep compassion.

The appetite for psychological knowledge is growing all the time and, while there are complex sociological explanations for this, my imminent concern is to think through the connections that bind modern psychological thinking to the humanist legacy that is Golden Rule thinking.

Golden Rule thinking is exactly that: it, too, encourages us, through empathetic acts of imagination, to recognise in others the humanity in which we all unarguably share.