American Imago

South Africa’s history, and the global perception of the country, is irrevocably coloured by the horror of the apartheid system. That system, mercifully, has proven terminable, thanks to the heroic and often mortal efforts of anti-apartheid activists and freedom fighters. However, the process of economic, political and psychological reconstruction which follows on the institutionalised carnage may, like a particularly complex analysis, prove interminable.

The place of psychoanalytic theory in illuminating such a process, and an analysis of the relation between a psychological theory and a particular social and political practice and history, is an inherently unstable one. The second half of the twentieth century has seen psychoanalytic theory move out of a concentration on its clinical and disciplinary contexts, in fulfillment of the tone of prophetic speculation of Freud’s later anthropological works. Crucial metapsychological concepts which preoccupied Freud, but not all of which were exclusive to psychoanalysis—like the culture/nature split, identification, ambivalence, pathology, the Other and the subject—have permeated the human sciences and been co-opted, hijacked, deformed, misunderstood or even forcefully and creatively deployed in many disciplines.

The influence of the conceptual arsenal of psychoanalysis has gone on despite, or perhaps because of, the numerous debates concerning its epistemological foundations and its clinical validity. In this regard we can recall Foucault’s famous elaboration in The Order of Things (1970) of psychoanalysis as a “counter-science”—a science concerned with the secret and unspoken object of all knowledge, that is, concerned with the knowledge of the Other. Psychoanalysis is thus founded as an epistemology on the great foundational division in knowledge itself (attributed to modernity by Foucault) between conscious [End Page 3] and unconscious processes, between the self and the not-self, between Culture and Nature.

Such a view of psychoanalytic epistemology may yet be too generalised to justify its use in accounting for the vicissitudes of a particular culture, social formation and political history. The privileged position psychoanalysis gives to primary and secondary processes, to identificatory structures in accounting for group dynamics, and ultimately its attempt to give an epistemological account of the differences between the normal, the abnormal and the pathological—without attempting to justify or censure any of those categories—represent its abiding strength as an explanatory discourse which has proven remarkably resilient and adaptive, despite charges of its temporal and social specificity as a bourgeois modernist discourse.

In the move from theory to practice however, from metapsychology to the clinic in its medico-scientific guise, psychoanalysis faces perhaps more problems than other psychological interventions. In particular the commitment to the universality of central metapsychological principles such as the structuring nature of the instinct to drive relation and the immanent character of the oedipus complex has come under attack from, on one hand, clinicians who see a need to address either immediate environmental causes of psychic disturbance, or who are committed to neurophysiological explanation and cure; and, on the other hand, from theorists of culture who work from the position of the substantive nature of relative cultural and subjective difference, particularly across race and gender categories.

In opposition to both of these stances, psychoanalysis retains a conceptual investment in a (perhaps transcendental, certainly universalisable) idea of the truth. On the ontogenetic level of the individual subject it retains a commitment to a contingent but recoverable truth of symptomatic or traumatic psychic reality. On a phylogenetic or social level psychoanalysis must also be invested in the idea that it is possible to understand social structures “symptomatically”—that is, to understand the nature of normative social functioning by asking questions of its pathological phenomena. [End Page 4]

Conceptually then, psychoanalytic theory has a problematic relationship to truth as such. The truth of the subject in psychoanalysis might be seen to translate as a radical determinism, that the subject is a subject of more or less transcendental psychic forces, a subject whose sense of agency has slipped into the unfathomable realms of the unconscious and the Other. Or, the truth of the subject might be more actively recoverable in symptoms to be analysed, resisted, worked through.

Similarly, given that there is universal agreement that the apartheid system was the last word in aberrance, and that there is universal agreement that the society which institutionalised it must be pathological, psychoanalysis might therefore be in a position to recover contingent truth about that symptomatic social structure. Of course, this work would only be possible if one agrees that the existence of the trauma—the apartheid system—and recovery from it—in this case, testimony to its horror—are equally unavoidable. In other words, psychoanalysis is unique among theories of social structure and politico-historical reality in accepting the inevitability of trauma and loss, but also accepting that the “whole truth”—at least in the sense of that phrase used by civic institutions of power and knowledge like government and the judiciary—is never recoverable.

The essays which appear in this special edition are all attempts to delineate a particular and historically specific symptomatology of South Africa after apartheid according to these generalisable precepts of a psychoanalytic reading of culture. In these attempts, most of the essays work from the assumption that the experience of traumatic violence endured by South African society under apartheid has produced a range of responses and preoccupations analogous to the formation of symptoms in the traumatised individuals who lived through the fascist regime.

Accordingly, the edition features a special focus on the major social institution of psychological and civic reconstruction in the country, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The hearings of the Commission are mass-mediated throughout South African society, and the testimony heard in high profile cases like those of Winnie Madikizela-Mandela or [End Page 5] former State President P.W. Botha—which may lead to prosecution, or an amnesty and a hoped-for reconciliation—serve as psychological templates for the attempt to “cure” a traumatised nation. These public hearings bear the burden of an attempt to provide a social psychotherapy for a nation which has undergone a radical trauma—a burden, that is, of the attempt to divert the irreducible factum brutum of the individual symptom into a therapeutic social procedure.

Clearly, much is invested for South Africa in the relative success of such a procedure, even though, in psychoanalytic terms, it might be seen as, at best, a social palliative rather than a therapeutic intervention, and at worst as a hindrance to and mass media diversion from grass roots clinical treatment.

The essays by Hamber, Hayes and Tjiattas approach the TRC, and the process represented by the institution, from very different angles. Hamber’s is the only non-psychoanalytic essay in the edition, and is included here by virtue of the author’s close working knowledge of the Commission, and the clear picture it gives readers of the role and function of the TRC.

The essay by Hayes represents much more of an anguished and personalised response to the psychoanalytic problem of the subtle but crucial difference between psychic reality and the experience of individual trauma, and the social experience of trauma and violence. Hayes thus focuses on the nature of the “truth” of trauma recoverable by psychoanalysis, set against the ability of testimony to enable recovery in the social sphere, the non-Lacanian real.

Finally in this mini-focus, the superb essay by Tjiattas addresses the question of what psychoanalytic technique can bring to an understanding of what she calls “political liberalism,” or what popular South African political parlance would call “democracy.” Tjiattas points out that the commitment psychoanalysis has to the recovery of repressed materials in the clinic can be instructive to a political system apparently attempting to establish itself on the grounds of democratic consensus and a commitment to full and free speech emblematised by the TRC, but which in reality operates much more on the agonistic principles of selective repression analogous to inter-agency dynamics. [End Page 6]

The rest of the essays in the collection are united, like these on the TRC, by a concern with the impact of psychical trauma in different arenas.

The pair of essays by van Zyl and Bertoldi both concentrate on a nexus of relationships crucial to human science thinking in contemporary South Africa, those between colonialism, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis. Postcolonialism has established itself as one of the most influential human science discourses in the contemporary South African academy, and these essays, taken together, mount a timeous and incisive critique of the postcolonial by elaborating a defence of psychoanalytic epistemology; Bertoldi from the historical point of view of the actual engagement of psychoanalysts in South Africa in the colonial and postcolonial era, thereby defending the notion of the universalisability of oedipus in understanding racial difference; and van Zyl from the more strictly epistemological position of a defence and recuperation of psychoanalytic concepts such as ambivalence, the fetish and ultimately the idea of the Other from their appropriation by both weak and strong versions of postcolonial theory.

The final essays in the edition, those by Noyes and Long-Innes, might be seen as psychoanalytic case studies of pressing sexual and social issues in the country and the southern African region.

Noyes’ fluent argument about sadomasochism in South Africa represents quite a different view of how psychoanlytic epistemology might be employed in understanding a particular culture in transition, and Long-Innes’ concerns range beyond the borders of the country, but address the same concerns of trauma, pathology and social upheaval, this time in the framework of a subtle and informed Kristevan psycholiterary analysis of the Mozambican writer Mia Couto.

Ultimately the essays in this special edition demonstrate a strong collective commitment to deploying psychoanalysis to understand the experiences of trauma, loss and past and continuing violence which occupy all South Africans. However, they also demonstrate the range and power available to psychoanalytic critique which militates against its often marginalised position outside of the clinic. If, as John Forrester (1990) avers, psychoanalys [End Page 7] is provides a means to “unwrite the future,” to prevent that future becoming a compulsive repetition of the trauma of the past, then it is hoped that the writing in this edition will contribute to such an unwriting in South Africa’s case.