Accordingly, the chapter explains why the sick behaviour of individuals can be a reflection not of chemical imbalances or dysfunctional childhoods, but of the degree of sickness prevailing in any given society. It argues further that the negation of universal human needs such as creativity, sociality and autonomy generates alienation in its technical sense, giving rise in turn to all manner of relational disturbances. The chapter maintains that the cultivation of hope, which, like all other emotions can be approached intersubjectively, depends on our capacity for recognising and responding to the psychological and material needs of our fellow South Africans.

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.

Rule Number Two: some things have to be healed. When people gather, there are many emotional wounds caught up in the discussion of social issues. You can see the pain on people’s faces as they desperately argue on behalf of their own needs and beliefs. It’s difficult to sustain a creative and happy society when the need for therapy is so strong and when little therapy is being offered.

The third symptom of power poisoning is selfishness. People who are puffed up with self-importance are prone to devote little attention to the burdens they inflict on others, and to care little about the plight of people with less privilege. In The Power Paradox, Dacher Keltner from the University of California at Berkeley shows that, in numerous studies—on everything from donating money, to teasing, to how much people talk, to negotiation strategies, to sharing cookies—when people lord over others or feel powerful and prestigious, they (1) focus more on satisfying their own needs, (2) focus less on others’ needs and behaviors, and (3) act as if the rules don’t apply to them.

People still don’t know how to do several things at once or understand the importance of imagination in relationship. They suffer their unions because they think of them as unconscious, surface acts instead of deep developments of the soul. Many people aim for surface compatibility instead of deep, nonrational connection.