Psychoanalysis and South Africa

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 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.

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...