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Available electronically in an open-access, full-text edition from the Texas A&M University Libraries' Digital Repository at http : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /146845. Child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Astrid Berg states in her introduction that \"South Africa is a microcosm.\" It is a modern nation, yet many of its inhabitants follow ancient traditions. It is a nation with a colonial past marked by periods of violence, yet it has managed to make a largely peaceful transition to majority rule. It is a nation with eleven official languages embracing a great diversity of cultures and customs, and yet it is also a land where public debate is vigorous, free, and ongoing. In short, South Africa is a place where connections are being built and maintained-both those among people with long kinship and common culture, and those that reach across historical, racial, and class divides. \"The western world is undeniably more advanced in certain areas of science and economic development,\" Berg states, \"but in other areas it seems to lag behind and could learn from\" places like South Africa.In her work with children and infants, Berg has become instrumental in building connections with and among her fellow South Africans of all ethnicities. Based upon Berg's 2010 Fay Lectures in Analytical Psychology at Texas A&M University, Connecting with South Africa: Cultural Communication and Understanding is both a self-reflective, subjective account and a scientific discourse on human development and intercultural communication. This volume will be warmly welcomed not only by psychoanalysts and those interested in Jungian thought and practice but also by anyone seeking more effective ways to learn from other cultures. Connecting with South Africa provides sensitive direction for those wishing to find healing and connection in a fractured society.

Robin DiAngelo’s influential concept of white fragility, while certainly suggestive and critically useful, does not go far enough in accounting for three central aspects of white anxiety as it occurs in the (post-)apartheid South African context. Utilizing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to sketch a rudimentary paradigm of anxiety, and focusing on textual examples drawn from (post-)apartheid popular culture – including the work of Rian Malan and Neil Blomkamp’s 2009 film District 9 – this paper opens up a series of distinct perspectives on (post-)apartheid whiteness. Departing from the construct of white fragility – which is less destabilizing, less dynamic, and less attentive to the dimension of fantasy than is the notion of white anxiety – it offers instead a Lacanian psychoanalytic conceptualization of white anxiety. One implication of such a reading is that, beneath the racist defensiveness of post-apartheid whiteness, an ambiguous mode of unconscious identification racial otherness might indeed be at play.

In post-apartheid South Africa we speak about race extensively. It permeates our workplace, weaves a thread through the fabric of our professional and personal lives, as well as our private conversations and public interactions with others. From within psychoanalytic theory, the thread weaves through the unknown content of our racialized unconscious. When there is a focus on race in the South African psychoanalytic context it largely takes the form of the struggle to articulate the complexities of working with difference, as Swartz notes, or the struggle to map out issues of race. Such struggles are not localized in South Africa, but strongly reflect a much broader struggle within the global psychoanalytic community, as mirrored in the expanding focus on race. Although the consulting rooms seem far removed from the ongoing political tensions that have recently emerged in South Africa, psychoanalytic psychotherapy remains a space of meaningful engagement with the other, and where the therapeutic dyad is one of racial difference it permits an encounter with our racialized unconscious. This article seeks to document the experience of my black client and my white response to her racial pain and struggle; in doing so, I describe the racial 'contact' between us and within us that triggers a racialized transference and countertransference dynamic, which contains the space for racial healing for both of us.

This thesis explores the assumption that race, as an inextricable dimension of subjectivity, is ubiquitous in the clinical encounter, shaping the intersubjective overlap between patient and therapist, fundamentally impacting the passage and integrity of the therapeutic task. Whilst the thesis considers race against the backdrop of psychoanalytic thinking globally, its particular focus is on the South African psychoanalytic environment, taking into consideration the moulding influence of context on the idiosyncratic ways in which race is insinuated into the clinical space. The study progresses through four core papers, the first of which offers commentary on, and a critique of the relationship between mainstream psychoanalytic thinking and race. It contends that the absence of a consideration of race in the forces which shape the psyche, betrays an avoidance of the potency of race, and its capacity to destablise the mainstays of psychoanalytic thinking, including analytic neutrality. Drawing on the experience of a working group of clinicians grappling with race, the second paper engages with the interpersonal violence of race and racism, considering the iterative cycles of rupture and repair which inevitably accompany engagements margined by race. Through the use of clinical vignettes, the third paper investigates the subjectivity of racialised encounters in the intimacy of the consulting room, considering, in particular, the impact on the therapist’s capacity to think when race enters the room. Qualitative in nature, the thesis is intentionally self-reflexive throughout. This reflexivity is foregounded in the fourth paper wherein the researcher/clinician’s subjectivity, and the way in which it has been disrupted by race, and indeed by the progression of the thesis, is engaged with. This subjectivity, and the influence of the researcher’s particular lens, is intrinsic to the passage of the research, and to its outcomes.

In this article I describe my personal journey from working as private practitioner to participating in the wider South African society. Post‐apartheid South African society struggles with overwhelming problems related to poverty, illness, violence, sexism, and racism. Moreover, in those communities where the trauma is most severe, professional resources are scarce. I propose a participatory approach which invites therapists to respond to these socio‐economic and political challenges and the problems that arise from them by thinking and acting outside the constraints of their consultation rooms and of traditional therapeutic conversations, into active participation in ways that might support healing and social transformation. I use two examples to illustrate and discuss the participatory approach with which I have engaged for over 10 years. The illustrative examples show how a participatory approach can create ripples that impact communities in healing and transformative ways.

This essay is a study of three texts written by the psychoanalyst Wulf Sachs. These texts hold an important lesson about the psychoanalytic turn in jurisprudence. Their attempt to extend psychoanalysis's frontiers to fight the legalization of racism in pre-apartheid South Africa recoils upon itself, stripping self-evidence from the singular constellation of law, life, language, and sovereignty psychoanalysis derives from ancient and modern tragedy and formalizes into a discipline. Even as Sachs's trilogy turns to psychoanalysis to critique the legalization of racism, it also points to the limits of psychoanalysis itself as a paradigm for the study of law.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

The anti-Black prejudice, ethnocentric ingroup preference, and affinity for right-wing politics and ideology of White right-wing authoritarians in South Africa suggest that they should be particularly opposed to political intolerance and infringements on civil liberties by a future Black, left-wing, majority rule government. In this study, conducted in August 1992 with 79 White South African students, the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale (Altemeyer, 1981) showed a strong positive correlation with anti-Black racial prejudice and a negative correlation with anti-White attitudes. However, the RWA scores were negatively associated with support for political tolerance by a new majority-rule government, despite indications that the intolerance would be directed against conservatives opposing the new state. This finding is consistent with a previous finding that right-wing authoritarians were more ready to persecute not only left-wing but also right-wing groups proscribed by governmental authorities, and it suggests that political intolerance, rather than ethnocentrism, ingroup loyalty, or right-wing politics, is fundamental to the authoritarian syndrome.

The relationship between relative deprivation, ethnic identification, and racial attitudes was investigated in random samples of 460 Whites and 466 Blacks on the eve of a new political dispensation in South Africa. Measurements of relative deprivation were obtained with regard to the social, financial, political, and work situation. Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of White attitudes toward Blacks were work-related deprivation and ethnic identification. Other predictors were gender and educational qualifications. Political and social relative deprivation, attitudes toward the in-group, income, and gender influenced Black attitudes toward Whites. The results of the study are explained against the background of sociopolitical and economic changes in South Africa.

The aim of this study was to examine racial discrimination of South African students using playing strategy in the prisoners dilemma game as an unobtrusive measure. University students (30 white and 30 black men) each played two 30-trial games, one with a black confederate and one with a white confederate. In each game, the students played against an identical 60% noncontingent strategy. Both the black and white students cooperated to a significantly greater extent with the black co-player. In the case of the white students, the degree of cooperation was largely determined by motivational orientation, with 7 of the students adopting a paternalistic approach that involved a deliberate attempt to assist the black co-player. This finding is interpreted in terms of reverse discrimination. The motivational orientation of the black students exerted a strong influence on their ratings of the co-player.

The theory underlying the concept of ethnocentrism embodies the assumption that thinking well of one's own group entails looking down on the members of other groups. Ray (1974), however, has shown that in a sample drawn from working-class suburbs of Sydney, Australia, Australian patriotism showed little relationship with racial attitudes. Because working-class attitudes could generally be poorly organized and because racial attitudes in Australia could be affected by the relative absence of blacks, similar studies were carried out by using a random sample from South Africa: 106 whites in Bloemfontein and 101 Indians in Durban. Attitude toward South Africa was found to show only a slight relationship with racism among both samples. The theory underlying the ethnocentrism concept would then appear to be essentially false.