What looked like a rainbow, therefore, was never a rainbow to begin with - and this was certainly not because Mandela ‘sold out’, as young radicals nowadays seem determined to believe. Indeed, that is the kind of retrospective judgement that can only be made by people who did not sit in jail for twenty-seven years. That there appeared to be a rainbow was only because South Africans did what human being ordinarily do: rather than confront the monsters of our deep, we chose instead to believe that they were no longer there. In the inspired words of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.

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 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.

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.

We all cling in one way or another, but as Hakuin reminds us, if we are searching for freedom, we must learn to lift up our hands. Early trauma like Jack’s cannot be healed by simply pointing out its origins. Understanding that he was not the cause of his parents’ anguish will not relieve him of the burden of it. But by working diligently to offset his mind’s tendency to repeat itself, Jack can become compassionate toward his childhood predicament rather than identifying exclusively with the pain of it. This was the deeper message I was trying to convey.