We Suffer Our Memories: Thinking About the Past, Healing, and Reconciliation

I

“Who is not personally concerned by the truth?” asks Lacan (1977, 118), and while acknowledging the dialectical and transgressive nature of truth in the analytic situation, he suggests that both the analyst and analysand are immensely interested in, and attached to, the truth. The truth of what it means to be a person, to live a meaningful and fulfilled life, to be cured, are concerns which circulate within therapy and circumnavigate the contexts of therapy. Indeed, when it comes to healing, who is not interested in truth? These issues of course are not addressed by floating truth in quotation marks. What is the difference between truth and “truth” besides our cowardice? And how should we approach truth, through its opposite, untruth, or are we better served by the term falsity? If truth is not an absolute, then surely it is to be found in the dialectics of its negation, untruth, falsity, ignorance, meconnaissance. How do we speak the truth, and where are the words to be found? With human experience inscribed and constituted in sociality, how do we locate this truth that we must speak? In other words, the truth is not only elusive, but multiple—personal truth, social truth, historical truth, political truth.

If the task of psychotherapy is conceived of as something more than taking away symptoms, making people cope with the consensual reality of everyday life, and alleviating neurotic misery, to paraphrase Freud, then helping the subject speak the truth becomes a fraught therapeutic and ethical task. The therapist as the subject who is supposed to know, provokes the person to speak (to speak the truth), and yet resists speaking for the person, in fact must frustrate the person’s desire as a condition for realising the (unbearable) truth of their individuality. Does it not follow that if the truth is so hard to come by in the analytic situation, where there are many “checks and balances” concerning the making conscious of the unconscious, finding and revealing (painful, hidden) memories, and facing the often unbearable truth of our lives, that the circumstances for speaking the truth about our social and political lives at least require some guarantee of emotional containment?

Seeing as society is not individuals writ large, how do we get people to speak the social truth, the political truth, the historical truth? Are these questions only pertinent to the individual realm, and would a different set of questions and conceptions be needed in talking about the social and political realm? While there is no adequate social theory of human agency, increasingly the interconnections between the individual and the social, between self and society are being rethought. For example, Zaretsky (1976) has criticised the ideological nature of social theorising that would have discrete notions and analyses for the realms of the individual and the social. Not only is the feminist slogan of “the personal is political” now a social theory truism, but the notion that “the political is also personal” is gaining currency within contemporary social theory (Giddens 1991; Elliott 1992; Calhoun 1996). Theories of individuality, and theories of the economy for instance, represent modes of understanding, cognitive representations of the complexities of social life in their necessary (epistemological) isolation from each other. However, social life is other, more total, more indivisible, and more open than the authority and closure that our theories suggest. The “authority” of the theories of social life is needed to deal with the reality (lived-experience) of our lives. There is not much authority in individual life, which might account for why it is often so incomprehensible and frightening, and why we are so attached to social institutions.

According to Jaques (1953; in Hinshelwood 1991) society itself might function as an emotional container, and hence the legitimacy and “authority” of certain social institutions as containers of inchoate human experience, and terrifying memories. South Africa’s past has left thousands of people with memories that are so choked with emotional pain that the process of forgetting has become seriously compromised. The social institution where the politics of the (apartheid) past is being...