This wound we call ‘apartheid’ will continue to be picked at compulsively. In both mind and practice, empathy has its limits; the relational pathologies of shame, envy and impasse are here to stay. The shame-filled violence, the envious value delusions and the ambivalent-avoidant attachments will persist long after we are gone. No matter the reparative attempts: there is a brokenness at the heart of our nation that cannot be wished away. If one considers the matter at the level of the individual, when the parent, teacher, or psychotherapist succeeds in providing optimal conditions for empathetic connection with a child, student or patient, it is hardly unusual for the latter to collapse the frame with enactments derived from still-active complexes.

But, as important as it is to understand the sources and details of one’s pain, understanding is rarely enough. My patients come to therapy wanting the burden of their accumulated experience lifted. Yes, they want to make sense of their lives, but that is not usually their fundamental or exclusive aim. First and foremost, they are trying to get over their accumulated trauma in order to feel less fearful, isolated, forlorn, helpless, alone, anxious, or depressed. They might not be able to say it so clearly, but they are reaching for things

beyond thought, trying to make contact with essential capacities that have been sacrificed in their efforts to adapt, adjust, comply, cope, or conform.

In one of his most important papers, “The Development of the Capacity for Concern,” written in 1963, toward the end of his life, Winnicott explained how important it is to help patients explore the ways that anger has kept them under its spell. Concern for others, he made clear, depends on being able to see others as whole people in and of themselves rather than as being there only to serve one’s needs.

As a patient of mine once quipped when speaking of how writing her memoir had helped her

deal with a sudden and unimaginable tragedy that had upended her life, “Writing is a much better quality of agony than trying to forget.

...the philosopher Richard Kearney sums up catharsis as a matter of “acknowledging painful truths.” This is a simple idea, but it gets to the heart of what it takes to clear out the soul.