Instead, I would try to offer readers something more practical - by exploring a range of public emotions connected to our country’s many social problems. By putting our nation on the couch, that is, I could venture inside South Africa’s mind.

The thing is, poverty in its absolute sense does not generate shame - it is relative poverty that does the damage. It is not for nothing, therefore, that South Africa - one of the most unequal societies in the world - is known also for being the protest capital of the world.

I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?

Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.

In the aforementioned South African study, for example, it is reported that perceived chronic radical discrimination acts independantly of other demographic variables - including several socioeconomic indicators - to negatively affect mental health. Around the world, young girls and women are particularly vulnerable to acts of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, along with all of the traumatogenic outcomes. Longitudinal studies since the 1930s have documented the impact of unemployment on physical and mental health. But when these forms of social suffering intersect in people’s lives - as in the case of impoverished black women, for instance - the adverse effects are compounded.