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American Imago 55.1 (1998) 101-134



Oedipus in (South) Africa?: Psychoanalysis and the Politics of Difference

Andreas Bertold

I. Introduction

In South Africa today the medical and psychological professions are being called to account for their conduct under apartheid. At stake is their failure to counter racism and its institutional manifestations, or worse, their active collusion with the government apparatus of the period. Already in 1985, Dawes, in a paper entitled "Politics and Mental Health: The Position of Clinical Psychology in South Africa," has suggested that mental ill-health (primarily in black patients) should be understood as a consequence of apartheid which he sees as "psychopathogenic," and which clinicians had failed to address (1985, 15). In his 1986 keynote address to the annual congress of the Psychological Association of South Africa, Simon Biesheuvel countered Dawes' assertions, and thus sets the stage for the rest of this paper.

Biesheuvel's response was that Dawes had overlooked the "importance of power in group relations, the humiliation of being totally dominated by a white minority and the identity problems created thereby" (1987,4). Furthermore Biesheuvel, although professing his opposition to it, argued that apartheid should not be immediately removed or opposed because, "as a statutory system it . . . [was] . . . only a proximate cause" of the crisis (4). Rather underlying the crisis was group prejudice and conflict--a conflict that was both primordial and universal, and must "be sought deep down in the nature of man" (4). [End Page 101] Although Biesheuvel had a place in his argument for fear and economic exploitation besides the motivation of aggression, he concluded that the real problem was the "effect of acculturation, the trauma of the transition from a rural subsistence economy to an urban technological one, from a very effective network of kinship and social relations to what is still a disorganized, unstable community life in the cities" (5).

What role then for psychology? According to Biesheuvel,

We need to search for value-free and culture-free universals, as well as recognize the need for culture-specific constructs. Politically motivated action research is acceptable, provided it does not bias empirical research procedures in declaring certain topics taboo, e.g., genetic explanations. Our society needs research into values, aggression, and violence but psychology can be more immediately useful by concentrating on short-term studies of cross-cultural attitude measurement, conflict management, media censorship, leadership development, and early-learning programmes for environmentally disadvantaged children. (1987,1)

The sub-text of this statement is, I hope, rather transparent! Biesheuvel's remarks set the stage for the development of my arguments in this paper, which seek to interrogate some of the issues surrounding psychoanalysis specifically (rather than psychology) in South African history. As such it will not be exhaustive of this relatively under-researched area, but rather the presentation of a range of problems and tensions around psychoanalysis and the politics of difference. These issues are already reflected in Biesheuvel's statements: the presupposition of groups (tribes, races etc.), the latent and sometimes explicit racism of psychological approaches, the ideas of culture or group conflict, deculturation and acculturation theory, and the vexed issues of universalism in psychoanalysis--issues present, I suggest, since the very first ventures into psychoanalysis in South Africa in the 1920s.

The history of psychology and psychoanalysis in Southern Africa specifically, and Africa more generally, is a rather [End Page 102] dubious affair. That there was collusion between psychiatry and the colonial apparatus is impossible to deny. The outlines of this have already been presented in texts such as Megan Vaughan's Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (1991), and the recently published Colonial Psychiatry and 'The African Mind' (1995), by Jock McCulloch, which provides a comprehensive overview of the history and writings of ethnopsychiatry and its imbrication in the colonial enterprise. These ethnopsychiatric writings were predominantly clinical in nature, and although they did draw on both psychoanalysis and ethnology, were mostly based on medical discourse.

To a certain extent psychoanalysis has escaped critical scrutiny due to its relatively marginal position on the African continent more generally, and South...

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