Psychoanalysis, Public Reason, and Reconstruction in the “New” South Africa

In theory at least, democratic procedures and practices broadly follow the tenets of practical reason. They are predicated upon the free availability of information,1 allow full and unconstrained use of individual deliberative capacities, and assume that by and large reasoners implement mechanisms of belief-formation that tend to produce epistemically and morally justifiable outcomes.

Given the wide acceptance of the view that a desirable model of social and civic participation in the “new” South Africa needs to go beyond one generated by merely procedural democratic tenets, it seems that discussion, deliberation and reasoning together in the manner described above should be essential components of democratic interaction. The guiding idea is one of autonomous citizens2 engaged in determining together the fundamental conditions of culture and society.

From a psychoanalytic perspective the presumption that these elements might be available in any society however “advanced” in the direction of free and equal participation might well appear naive not to say deluded. Any reservations from this quarter would be underpinned by much recent political thought highlighting the peculiar difficulties within pluralist democracies of finding shared bases of political agreement through ordinary procedures of rational and reasonable discussion.

These difficulties can be expected to be exacerbated in societies in which fundamental, historically entrenched cultural divergences predominate, of which South Africa can be taken as paradigmatic.