But it emphasises also the limit of empathy, explaining why both the wounds of our past and their enactments in the present will continue to haunt us. The affective tone that must colour our strivings, therefore, is neither untrammelled optimism nor hopeless despair: it involves, instead, a tempered liminal space in which we, as citizens, commit ourselves to an unfolding process of searching for moments of meeting where recognition of our shared humanity becomes possible.

And yet, since dignity - understood as recognition - is something that must be conferred, two other assumptions about the human condition must be made: first, homo sapiens are inclined in some respect to regard one another as equals; and second, they cannot live optimally without having some form of relationship with each other. Indeed, both these ideals - that we are an egalitarian and social species - have become so commonplace in many parts of the world as to sound like hackneyed New Age notions.

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.

Recognition, therefore, is not a goal, but a struggle to sustain an emotionally meaningful contact with one’s own experience, and always in the context of the emotional experience of others.

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.