In this respect, Jungian analyst James Hillman goes as far as holding psychotherapy responsible for the tawdriness of American politics since the 1950s. In his reckoning, all the smart people are sitting in therapy incapacitated, their therapists having convinved them that the source of their misery is to be found within themselves. The net result is a state of near oblivion as regards the political debacles that have unfolded around them for the last half-a-century.

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.

When someone comes into my consulting room for therapy, I’m on the alert for signs of the soul’s condition. I will hear many stories and some complaints about life, but I see my job as caring for the deep and usually hidden life of the soul. This orientation is essential. You can’t do real psychotherapy without it. Often what is called therapy looks more like life management than soul care. You can rearrange your life, but that is not the same as giving your deep soul what it needs and craves.

“Jung placed complexes at the heart of his psychology, describing a complex as a “splintered psyche” or as a fragment of the psyche, highly emotional and—the key quality—autonomous. A complex acts like a person inside you who can take possession of you and make you feel things you wish you did not feel. It can also give you a good picture of what is going on deep in the psyche. This is an important clue for therapy. Complexes are not things to get rid of directly. They are a doorway to the entire psyche, and so therapy pays close attention to them and respects them.

We are in psyche; psyche is not in us. The way we order and shape our world profoundly affects how our soul is either fed or starved in daily life.