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.

Instead, what appears to be of greatest benefit to patients is the genuineness and persuasiveness of therapists - qualities neither of which are especially flexible in professional training. But as counselling psychologist Paul Moloney points out, if warmth and confidence are the calling cards of successful psychotherapists, then it is worth observing that this principle - and I quote him with some reluctance - “applies equally to politicians, salespeople and prostitutes”.

If the therapist cultivates a life of serenity and neutrality, she stands a chance against the wild beasts that are let loose in a psyche that has not yet found its fenced pasture. In medieval Europe stories were told of the unicorn, a beautiful animal that could cause widespread damage and yet was the very symbol of health. The image of the unicorn at its most useful showed him in a small pasture surrounded by a wooden fence. The psyche needs some containment, a fence or a vessel, to keep its wildness contained.

He [Winnicott] was by no means a Buddhist, but I believe he, too, healed by modeling being. He mostly used mother/infant vocabulary to describe his mode of relating, but this did not stop him from describing, in disarmingly frank terms, his own internal process:

It is only in recent years that I have become able to wait and

wait . . . and to avoid breaking up this natural process by making

interpretations. . . . It appals me to think how much deep change I

have prevented or delayed . . . by my personal need to interpret. If

only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively

and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this joy more than I used to

enjoy the sense of having been clever. I think I interpret mainly to let

the patient know the limits of my understanding. The principle is

that it is the patient and only the patient who has the answers. We

may or may not enable him or her to encompass what is known or

become aware of it with acceptance.

Our minds are like children, and mindfulness, like a good therapist or a good-enough parent, “holds” them so that they can grow up and come to their senses. With enough practice, and enough patience, breakthroughs occur. These take many idiosyncratic forms but they are

generally of two types.

On the one hand, there is a loosening of identification with the known self; people see their self-concepts as just concepts that have arisen and accumulated in response to the particular challenges and conditions of their lives but that have no ultimate stigmatizing reality. On the other hand, there is a return to simply “being.” This is set in motion when awareness becomes dominant, when the observing mind becomes stronger than that which is being observed. As this observational capacity develops, a change sometimes occurs. Instead of one part of the mind observing another—“me” watching “myself”—the whole thing collapses and just “is.