But the basic point is this: the intersubjective cultivation of hope - in the absence of actual material prospects - amounts to little more than another cheap kumbaya moment for the masses. Hope cannot exist within a psychological matrix of shame, envy and impasse while a material base marked by rampant inequality remains locked in place. As for the observable correlates of everyday violence, ressentiment-driven value delusions and alienated consumerism, these should remind us that nothing less than our shared humanity is at stake.

And just as therapist and patient must negotiate their hopes in dialectical conversation with one another, we, too, have to nurture between us the most fragile of cargoes, with the retaliation that what each of us does in our lives on a moment-to-moment basis will ripple through the ages. There has to be a revolt and a sincere engagement with it - failing which there can be no shared hopes, only selfish ones.

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.

And yet this enduring struggle to re-cognise one another should not be seen as doomed to hopeless failure: this is because our earnest striving for mutuality is not a promised land but a process evolving all the time. The task before us is a daunting one - first creating and then immersing ourselves in a stream of openings for psychotic recognition, all the while appreciating that each of us is a moving target, different each time at the moment of being found.

The only certainty, to restate Baldwin, is that nothing can be changed if it is not confronted. By showing up and not retreating, by engaging and not dissociating, by searching for and not giving up on one another, we give ourselves and the generations to come the best chance of living with - instead of being lived by - our trauma. History cannot be overcome but, instead of carrying it on our backs, labouring under it, we can learn to walk beside it.