Nation on the Couch

The more I listened at case conferences, the more I realised that we were dealing with nested systems of dysfunction beyond the identified (child) patient: there was also marital discord, familial conflict, inadequate schooling, community decay and - it goes without saying - acute financial need.

As I thought about the general psychology of violence and protest in our country - in relation to both my clinical work and the particular milieu of my academic life - one word seemed to capture it all: alienation. Whether in relation to the state, communities, institutions, working environments, families, spouses - even one’s sense of self - it appeared to me that South African protestors were raging against an abiding disconnect between internal desire and external reality, or a state of alienation written into both the objective conditions of life in the external world, as well as their internal, subjective experiences of that world.

Instead, I would try to offer readers something more practical - by exploring a range of public emotions connected to our country’s many social problems. By putting our nation on the couch, that is, I could venture inside South Africa’s mind.

”I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know” is how philosopher Slajov Žižek puts it. Or to use psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s concept of the unthought known, it is a case of knowing something but not wanting to think about it.

In the eyes of apartheid’s victims, that is, South Africa’s traumatic history has never been fully integrated into the life of the nation: it is not without reason, therefore, that sections of the public continue to call for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission ‘2.0’. From the perspective of a psychoanalytically inclined psychotherapist, a case can surely be made linking this dissociative amnesia to our propensity for committing and repeating the kinds of acts that are considered heinous by any moral yardstick - all in all, an unconscious attempt to master the original traumas inflicted by colonial and apartheid rule.

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.

Despite implicating a slew of topics, that is, alienation refers ultimately to “indifference and internal division, but also powerlessness and relationlessness with respect to oneself and to a world experienced as indifferent and alien. Alienation is the inability to establish a relation to other human beings, to things, to social institutions and thereby also - so the fundamental intuition of the theory of alienation - to itself.

This is why Jameson chooses Freudian psychoanalysis as another case study in fragmentation: the rise of psychoanalysis was bound up with the fragmentation of our psyches, which is itself a consequence of the relentless expansion of the capitalist project.

For Jameson, that is, the rationalisation of bourgeois society shattered the social collectivity, giving rise to a nuclear family that would come to occupy the boundary between the public and the private spheres. It is not by accident, therefore, that the entire collection of psychoanalytic dramas - childhood trauma, primal scene fantasies, the Oedipus complex - relied on the historically located institution of the bourgeois family. Indeed, psychoanalysis is completely dependent on the capitalist mode of production for its supply of patients: energies that were distributed over the entire social body came to be invested exclusively in the family, with calamitous outcomes. As cultural critic Michael Venture notes, “In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there’s nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs onto a relationship or expect them to be met by a family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.

There is a great deal more to be said about Jameson’s reading of psychoanalysis, but for our purposes, the basic point is this: alienation encompasses the wholesale “fragmentation of the world as well as our perceptions of it”.

Interestingly, one of its core postulates is that the essential sociality of us all, or the universal human impulse to relate to others. In so far as we are relationship-seeking beings, then, what is the connective tissue that actually binds people together, that gives effect to this relational striving? In contrast to the popular belief that knowledge precedes action, I argue that emotions are what prompt and sustain human interactions - and not emotions in the conventional sense, of private feeling states stored inside our heads, each with its own unique biochemical correlate. I regard emotions, instead, as intersubjective phenomena that can be said to exist between people. How else does one explain being moved by a piece of music, a spellbinding movie or a superb novel, if not that some mysterious element - an emotion - has connected to the heart of the composer, the director or the author to the heart of the listener, the watcher or the reader?

In this respect, Jungian analyst James Hillman goes as far as holding psychotherapy responsible for the tawdriness of American politics since the 1950s. In his reckoning, all the smart people are sitting in therapy incapacitated, their therapists having convinved them that the source of their misery is to be found within themselves. The net result is a state of near oblivion as regards the political debacles that have unfolded around them for the last half-a-century.

Emotions are mainly social. The word comes from the Latin ex movere, to move out. Emotions connect to the world.

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.

... the final chapter delineates the so-called ‘Golden Rule’ as a dignified mode of human relating that is based on acts of deep empathy. It describes how this ancient philosophy - that we treat others as we wish to be treated and that we do not treat them as we do not wish to be treated - emerged all over the world as a result of the rampant structural violence unleashed by the rise of agrarian societies.

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.

There is something almost embodied about the experience of shame - as when a child runs up proudly to its teacher announcing its latest feat, which of course has never before been accomplished anywhere in the history of little people. The bored teacher’s response is as swift as it is mindlessly brutal - it comes in the form of a dispiriting putdown of the child’s vital sense of discovery. Shamed in front of its peers, the emotion sinks in and the child’s body crumples: the shoulders collapse, the stomach drops, the eyes lose focus. That is the unforgettable experience of shame - a self collapsing inwards - an experience encoded in a body, which, from that moment onwards, will forever remember the score.

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.

What is of immediate interest to me as a psychotherapist is that the dominant political trend of our time - identity politics - is profoundly psychological, being organised around the injured dignity of oppressed groups. Each group, that is, claims a misattunement between a felt group identity and an outer world that rejects it. For proponents of identity politics, therefore, the problem of dignity turns on a society that is pathologically invalidating. Human beings are first and foremost social beings, and when social formations compromise the dignity of marginalised groups as a matter of routine, the consequences are devastating, involving either self-hating shame or envious resentment.

This will not surprise cognitive psychologists, of course, who have known for years that knowledge does not translate into action. Psychotherapists, too, regard it as fairly unremarkable that the self can be so damaged as to be incapable of acting in its own interests.

Meanwhile, income inequality and male youth unemployment emerge as the strongest correlates of murder and major assault.

In their widely praised book, The Spirit Level, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett describe how inequality in modern, industrialised nations generates fear, envy and resentment, affecting the physical and mental wellbeing of both the poor and the well-to-do.

Social ressentiment - in the terminology of Max Scheler - “must therefore be strongest in a society like ours, where… formal social equality, publicly recognised, go[es] hand in hand with wide factual differences in power, property and education”. For ordinary people, such a divergence can only make sense by evaluating themselves negatively. By admitting that they lack all “badges of ability”, the poor man and woman can lay to rest the question that has followed them all their lives: the question of why - despite their best efforts - they got nowhere in life. Assuming personal responsibility for a society that failed them, not only do they feel the pain of inadequacy - they resent themselves for feeling it.

It is no wonder that the few who rise above their class cannot live with the shame of having distinguished themselves. They can neither be who they are nor stay where they are: many will marry outside their social circle; most will leave the neighbourhood for good. That is how class society operates: “In turning people against each other, the class system of authority and judgement-making goes itself into hiding; the system is left unchallenged as people enthralled by the enigmas of its power battle one another for respect.”

In an unequal society that professes equality for all, shame rears its head at every turn; for the poor and working classes in particular substance use becomes a ready consolation. Indeed, South Africa - with the second highest Gini coefficient for income inequality - also has one of the highest alcohol consumptions in the world.

The resort to substances, that is, can be conceptualised as a defence against chronic feelings of shame - as much as it can trigger the very same feelings.

Gilligan, J. (2001). Preventing violence. London: Thames and Hudson, 29.

Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a national epidemic, 106.

Yet shame by itself, Gilligan continues, is not a sufficient condition for the exercise of violence. In order to construct a comprehensive account of violence, one must consider additional factors. From a developmental perspective, for example, a person who has been charmed but has not yet developed the capacity for other feeling states - such as love, empathy, guilt or simply the fear of retribution - is more likely to project feelings of humiliation outwards. As for the social determinants of violence, a similar result can be expected when a person lacks other means of earning respect, such as formal education, occupational skills, financial options, or even some standing within the community. It is these social factors that prove decisive in highly unequal societies such as South Africa, for, without personal resources of any kind, one does not need to have been shamed as a child - whether the medium was physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. As described in the previous section, a society can be sufficiently shaming all by itself for the affected individual to act out in horrific ways.

In fact, one of the things that people in this country find so utterly disorientating, is the banality of violence that surrounds them. The word ‘senseless’ is invoked repeatedly when describing violence in South Africa, which provides, paradoxically, an important clue for making sense of it. It is precisely the senselessness of the violence, in other words, that helps us comprehend it.

Perpetrators are so engulfed by their shame, “including over matters that are so trivial, that their very triviality makes it even more shameful to feel ashamed about them”. Shame envelopes shame: what appears to be ‘unprovoked’ violence is anything but that - and, as Gilligan reminds us, “[a] man only kills another when he is, as he sees it, fighting to save himself, his own self - when he feels he is in danger of experiencing… the ‘death of the self’”.

The thing is, poverty in its absolute sense does not generate shame - it is relative poverty that does the damage. It is not for nothing, therefore, that South Africa - one of the most unequal societies in the world - is known also for being the protest capital of the world.

In a landmark study on homicide and suicide, it was observed that the lower social strata - due to chronic feelings of powerlessness - tended to project blame onto others and, therefore, were more prone to acts of homicide than suicide. By contrast, the more affluent classes - given their developed sense of self-efficacy - tended to internalise blame and, accordingly, were more inclined to commit suicide than homicide. Several studies have confirmed the aforementioned finding regarding the inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and homicide-suicide ratios.

It is of critical importance to recognise that for people who regard themselves as having no recourse to better their lives, the exercise of violence proves an intoxicating surrogate. Shame - despite its origins in the self - is an excruciatingly public emotion. To feel it is to feel oneself a reprobate. Overcompensation through personal achievement is not an option. When a person feels judged - hounded - by the jury that is public opinion, the only way to exorcise that feeling is to eliminate the jury altogether. In the mind of the perpetrator, transferring one’s own suffering onto another human being becomes a viable - almost noble - moral calculus, turning the master-slave dialectic on its head.

This individualisation of trauma is typical of medical model thinking, but its unfortunate consequence is that our society is disinclined to regard the victims of structural violence as being the victims of trauma. Accordingly, the empathy we ordinarily show survivors of (individual) traumas is withheld from those who are victims of social trauma. It is no wonder, then, that we think nothing of confining offenders with the most traumatic social histories to the most traumatising places on earth.

Who we are is a product of where we have been. Psychotherapists usually understand this in respect of a given patient’s personal history - the absent father, the critical mother, the jealous sibling, the abusive cousin - but equally, there can be no denying the importance of one’s social history either. The areas we live in, the schools we attend, the quantity and quality of our caregiving, the various affirmations and discriminations that come our way - each of these experiences is layered in complex ways by social, economic and political forces far beyond the control of any single person.

Returning, then, to Scheler’s philosophy, his translators prefer the French ressentiment over the English ‘resentment’. This is because Scheler himself has in mind something much deeper than ‘mere’ resentment. In his view, ressentiment has several elements. First, a human being experiences some injury and an associated negative emotion. Second, he or she is unable to express this emotion directly, usually on account of occupying a lower position in a given status hierarchy. Third, the negative emotion is consequently repressed. Lastly, under the direction of a repressed desire for revenge that proceeds “via rancor, envy, and impulse to detract all the ways to spite”, the subject falls prey to ‘value delusions’, demeaning those value that are objectively superior, while valorising others that are objectively inferior.

According to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence refers to a situation in which the oppressed cannot but assess their predicament through the terms of reference provided by the oppressor, and thereby unwittingly participate in their own subjugation. By contrast, the protests that have shaken South African university campuses over the last five years signal a conscientisation about the workings of symbolic violence. All the talk of intellectual colonisation, Eurocentrism, whiteness, privilege, epistemic violence and so on is university-speak for a perceived system of knowledge and an encompassing institutional culture that makes it impossible for black students and academics to participate as their white counterparts’ equals in intellectual life.

There is a logic behind human conduct, although it does not reveal itself through conventional reasoning skills.

This brings me to the psychoanalytic perspective and its major advantage over other approaches, namely, its ready acceptance that humans are motivated, for the most part, by factors far beyond their conscious awareness.

The outsized affective component involved in these performances constitutes one of the hallmarks of the unconscious reaction formation. The desire for whiteness - which is unconscious - is so threatening that it must be defended at all costs. The conscious mind responds, therefore, with an emotional discharge that, while ostensibly an overreaction, is in fact directly proportional to this unconscious sense of threat.

The breast upon which the infant is so utterly dependent must be destroyed because of that dependence. The spoiling act is similar to that of a child who, being desirous of another child’s toy, breaks it to ward off its own feelings of helplessness. In the developing mind of the infant, sadistic attacks on the breast increase until it is entirely without value: in the words of Klein, “it has become bad by being bitten up and poisoned by urine and faeces”. The stronger and more enduring the envy, the more difficult it becomes for the infant to reclaim the lost object, to make good through reparations.

The point is this: as much as elite university culture can leave black students struggling with feelings of alienation, it is not the primary locus of the problem. Fallist rage originates in prior humiliations - misrecognitions - that are raced, classed and gendered in complex ways. Shame, after all, is hardwired into the chronicity of everyday and structural violence: unable to exact revenge, the original trauma that is structural violence is forgotten - but the sense of injury remains. It is picked at compulsively, eventually exploding without warning onto unwitting secondary targets.

To begin with, proponents of decolonisation almost never acknowledge one basic fact - that most poor and working-class students have suffered the indignity of being miseducated for twelve years of their lives. South Africa’s schooling system ranks consistently amongst the worst in the world and by the time these students enter elite universities, they are hopelessly prepared for academic life and struggle to cope with the unrelenting institutional demands. But instead of acknowledging these difficulties as areas for personal development, like Aesop’s fox they conclude that the grapes must be sour because they are unreachable.

Frustrated and without counter-values of their own, they can only attack the existing institutional order, despising it in public yet desiring it in secret. They have forgotten their original crime - their own miseducation - and vent their anger at the university authorities instead.

That is why the influence of the middle-class ressentiment should not be underestimated. There is, of course, a substantial gap between the ivory tower and the street - but it is equally true that what happens on university campuses filters into public spaces. I mention this because research conducted in the middle of the twentieth century showed how followers of facist movements were most likely to come from the lower strata of the middle classes who, because their strivings for self-improvement were continuously blocked, were most susceptible to developing feelings of ressentiment.

One can see the same happening in national politics as quasi-facist movements swim ever closer to the political mainstream. With the degree of cooperation between the two spheres increasing all the time - and with social inequality showing few signs of abating - it is only a matter of time before impotent rage - ressentiment - gets channelled into the creation of anti-democratic political movements.

After all, there is something to be said about corruption - or unregulated consumption - in a social landscape scarred by centuries of deprivation. Greed is inevitable in this context; as it happens, it turns out to be the cousin of envy too. Both states suggest preoccupation with a prized commodity: the man of envy is powerless over its supply; the man of greed devours it as he wishes, when he wishes. The desire of one is frustrated by lack; the desire of the other cannot be sated even by plenty. One looks on forlornly from the sidelines; the other is on the field of play, feasting, snout revelling in the trough.

Like love and hate, envy and greed are two sides of the same coin. That envy should become greed is perfectly plausible with the shoe on the other foot and deprivation turning into abundance. In both cases, a compromised self-formation makes it extremely difficult to slow down what are compelling - and ultimately destructive - psychic processes.

In the jargon of psychotherapy, canines seem to possess limitless reserves of unconditional positive regard: no matter the quality of human interaction, they always come back for more. With dogs there is no need to keep up appearances, one does not have to be mindful of their mental states, in contrast to those exhausting everyday engagements with humans. One is free to be oneself, like the patient who freely unburdens herself to herself to her therapist, without regard for the latter’s feelings (assuming said patient is not a pathological accommodator). And in return, dogs - with their documented sensitivity to the latter’s feelings - invariably deliver the suitably empathetic reflection, demonstrating an almost implicit ‘theory of mind’.

What will happen, then, to a master subjectivity birthed, shaped and nourished through the existence of slaves when the master-slave dialectic implodes? In the disquieting words of relational psychoanalyst Melanie Suchet: “If you are no longer that to me, then who am I to myself?

The multi-purpose colonial dog cannot solve what is a monumental predicament. Well-intentioned yet continually unable to socialise with the natives, the white settler repeats history in grand Marxian fashion, “first as a tragedy, then as farce”. Emigration offers the prospect of a life in which one no longer has to agonise about engaging with slaves who refuse to be treated as slaves any longer. Blindness to the Other can continue uninterrupted; one need not countenance the horrifying prospect of becoming the equals of former underlings. Having prospered off the land for hundreds of years, there is little sense of civic responsibility, no pang of duty to contribute towards social betterment.

Still, as the Fanonian scholar Hussein Bulhan explains, colonisers are basically tragic figures. On the one hand, they need the colonised to remain in their place, to serve as the unquestioning repository of their projections - a fate that no human being will tolerate indefinitely. On the other, since the colonial relationship is effectively a recapitulation of the master-slave dialectic, the coloniser never feels recognised as a human - because the act of recognition is made by a slave and is therefore worthless. It is this hapless situation that creates what the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève famously called the existential impasse of the master. Such an impasse confronts, arguably, many white South Africans today.

Authoritarian regimes are being elected all over the world, and the present risk is that the histories of oppressed peoples will be driven further underground, despite - or dare one say, because of - the radical left.

As important as it is to build platforms on social issues, the bullying tactics of the left run the risk of alienating even fair-minded people. Imitation cannot win the day, and when intellectuals get praised for their ‘courage’ - that is, for merely saying what they think - then one realises that panic-driven pandering has become the new norm! In his inimitable style, it was Nietzsche who said, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

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.

Emotions, that is, are not private experiences, unknown to the wider world, locked away inside our heads. As per its Latin etymology - ex movere - an emotion an emotion is fundamentally a social, relational phenomenon because it is always in motion, always spiralling outwards, always touching the people around it. But when the relational impulse is perverted - as in the examples of shame, envy and impasse - a litany of varied social pathologies must follow, including human-on-human violence, an inversion of a once-shared hierarchy of values and a refusal to acknowledge the humanity of the Other.

Personally, I regard it [hope] as something that can also be held between people, a position that is consistent with this book’s primary argument, namely, the irreducible sociality of human beings. It is a happy coincidence, therefore, that life in South Africa is shaped by the hopeful concept of ubuntu - an idea so widespread that it has virtually become a national export.

The phantoms formed in the brains of men are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness.

As Jungian analyst James Hillman remarked, “Psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognising that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets - the sickness is out there.

I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?

Variables such as race, class and gender and regarded by the mainstream not as game-changers for intervention practices but as little more than demographic information. Critical social theory is not usually a part of training programmes, with the result that newer generations of psychotherapists have quite restricted, technique-oriented understanding of patients’ life problems.

Antidepressants do not make you happy - they just blunt your sensitivity to what radical psychiatrist Thomas Suze calls “problems in living”. Antipsychotics suppress - rather than remove - the disturbing phenomena associated with psychosis.

James objected to the dissection of mental life into reaction times and what psychotherapist Gustav Fechner called “just-noticeable differences”. Despite his belief in the possibility of a scientific psychology, James insisted that consciousness had a dynais, stream-like quality; he had no time for fundamentalist experimentalists whom he witheringly dismissed as “prism, pendulum and chronograph-philosophers”.

Instead, what appears to be of greatest benefit to patients is the genuineness and persuasiveness of therapists - qualities neither of which are especially flexible in professional training. But as counselling psychologist Paul Moloney points out, if warmth and confidence are the calling cards of successful psychotherapists, then it is worth observing that this principle - and I quote him with some reluctance - “applies equally to politicians, salespeople and prostitutes”.

Middle-class students in South Africa, that is, are becoming increasingly adept at identifying what we now call epistemological - or symbolic - violence, while appearing oblivious to the problem of real, concrete violence. We cannot blame them, of course, because the burden of responsibility rests with us as their bourgeois teacher.

While there is little data being generated in low- and middle-income nations, a study of a nationally representative sample of South African adults yielded similar findings - that is, a clear association between socio-economic status and psychological distress.

In the aforementioned South African study, for example, it is reported that perceived chronic radical discrimination acts independantly of other demographic variables - including several socioeconomic indicators - to negatively affect mental health. Around the world, young girls and women are particularly vulnerable to acts of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, along with all of the traumatogenic outcomes. Longitudinal studies since the 1930s have documented the impact of unemployment on physical and mental health. But when these forms of social suffering intersect in people’s lives - as in the case of impoverished black women, for instance - the adverse effects are compounded.

One should not be surprised, therefore that scholarly discussions of inequality and economic exploitation in the twenty-first century can proceed without any mention of the socialist canon, while the postmodern emphasis on raced, sexed and gendered alterity preponderates - a conversation dominated, it must be said, by bourgeois protagonists.

Under capitalism, however, labour is no longer an expression of an innate need for creativity but is oriented instead towards another overarching goal - profit maximisation - as a result of which, two things follow: labour is subordinated to the pressures of the market and worker autonomy is constrained.

But the tragedy doesn’t end there: capitalism not only destroys creativity in the context of labour, but creativity per se. All of the creative activities besides work - creating art, writing poetry, playing an instrument, learning a language - require the one thing that capitalism denies its workers, and that is time. Left to the discretion of capitalists, the workday lengthens and intensifies; leisure time is used not for the pursuit of other creative activities but for recuperating from the rigours of work itself. The rise of the flexi-time schedule worsens the situation as workers are now either at work, recovering from work or waiting to go to work, with the distinction between work time and free time duly eliminated.

In the world beyond therapy, however, intersubjective hope demands nourishment at two levels - first, at a socio-psychological level defined by reciprocal recognition, and second, at a social-material level involving an equitable distribution of the resources required for dignified living. This is easier said than done: what I am describing, after all, is a virtual utopia in which each of us feels recognised in our humanity, and in which our basic needs are adequately satisfied. In fact, when placing this quandary in proper historical context, one realises that the history of our species - never mind South Africa - is a history of masters and slaves.

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.

What, then, constitutes a life of dignity, what makes a life incontrovertibly human? One can hardly do better than Martha Nussbaum’s catalogue of ten central human capabilities. This is not the occasion to repeat the entire list, so allow me to quote only those of her reflections that are of imminent relevance. For Nussbaum, being human means: “... Being able to move freely from place to place… Being able to use the senses; being able to imagine, to think, and to reason and to do these things in a ‘truly human’ way, a way informed and cultivated by an adequate education… Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life… Being able to live for and in relation to others, to recognise and show concern for other human beings, to engage in various forms of social interaction; being able to imagine the situation of another and to have compassion for that situation; having the capability for both justice and friendship… Having the social bases of self-respect and non-humiliation; being able to be treated as a dignified being whose worth is equal to that of others… being able to participate effectively in political choices that govern one’s life… being able to hold property… being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other workers.

In the pursuit of collective hope, the bottom line is that personal change and social transformation are inseparable: as much as we need programmes for social improvement, we also need to remember that the small things still matter.

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.

To foster an intersubjective milieu that both recognises and honours the inherent sociality of human beings is no simple feat, especially in violent societies where projection and withdrawal are the common psychological responses to perceptions of threat. Add to this mix the phenomenology of alienation - and a difficult task becomes a seemingly insurmountable one. Psychoanalyst Nina Coltart had something interesting to say about this, namely, the person who is interested only in getting better: “Psychoanalytical therapy has nothing to offer a patient who only wishes to be relieved of his suffering.

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.

In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argues that the civilisational setup is antithetical to human happiness: the individual quest for freedom - specifically, the discharge of the sexual and aggressive drives - is thwarted repeatedly by societal demands for conformity. And yet, despite identifying easily with two sources of our suffering - the awesome power of the natural world and the hopeless fragility of the human constitution - we are less inclined to concede as the third, and main, source of that suffering the lockstep marching of state and society. In Freud’s view, “When we start considering this possibility, we come across a contention which is so astonishing that we must dwell on it. This contention holds that what we call our civilisation is largely responsible for our misery, and that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions. I call this contention astonishing because, in whatever way we may define the concept of civilisation, it is a certain fact that all the things with which we seek to protect ourselves against the threats that emanate from the sources of suffering are part of that very civilisation.

The so-called Golden Rule is as old as civilisation itself. In its positive form, it calls for right action, that is, treating others as one would hope to be treated oneself. In its negative form, it calls for right inaction, or, not doing to others what one would not have done for oneself. Both iterations call for imaginative acts of deep empathy and, for this, one could do worse than look to the great world teachers for instruction.

The early Buddhists, evidently, were not meant to retire from the world - as suggested also by the Zen Buddhist aphorism, “Before enlightenment chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment chop wood, carry water.” Despite the ingrained class oppressions of the Hindu varna system, the Buddha was not dissuaded from ordering his monks to strive for the benefit of all people. Great compassion was impossible without its realisation through concrete practice: his teachings were as much about kind thoughts as they were about loving actions. As noted by religious historian Karen Armstrong, “Instead of simply eschewing violence, Buddhism demanded a positive campaign to assuage the suffering and increase the happiness of the whole world.

Then there is the pantheism characteristic of Native American religion, with its belief in an immanent god that cannot be separated from reality as we know it. The point, however, is this: the universality of the Golden Rule did not come about because all was right in the world of humans.

The appetite for psychological knowledge is growing all the time and, while there are complex sociological explanations for this, my imminent concern is to think through the connections that bind modern psychological thinking to the humanist legacy that is Golden Rule thinking.

Golden Rule thinking is exactly that: it, too, encourages us, through empathetic acts of imagination, to recognise in others the humanity in which we all unarguably share.

This point signals the important difference between idealism - when we maintain our values despite the odds - and idealisation - when we deny the odds altogether. To be a good citizen requires that we hold fast to what psychotherapists call ‘the frame’ - the set of conscious routines (for example, the time, duration and confidentiality of sessions) that make therapeutic work possible. In the context of conscious citizenship, it means showing up consistently and tolerating the frequently disabling anxiety that comes with living in this country. Sometimes we are the ones who bring the storm, at other times we are the ones who have to weather it, but we are always involved, implicated. There is not a moment in which something is not being asked of us, whether we are required to give a part of ourselves or receive a part of someone else.

There is something tragic about such noble suffering, that the only way around trauma is through it. This is why the word character - etymologically speaking - is about being etched, marked or carved with lines, as opposed to being free of all blemishes. Musing about the workings of psychoanalysis, the famed British analyst Wilfred Bion described once how “if there aren’t two anxious people in the room, the two being both the therapist and the patient, then there is not much point in turning up to find out what you already know.

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.

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.

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.