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The title of Wahbie Long's book captures both the ambition and the audacity of his project. To venture a single diagnostic formulation for a nation's ills is audacious. To thread that needle using psychology (and sometimes psychoanalysis) as the principal analytic tool is a lot more difficult still, due to the positivist and colonialist foundations of that field, not to mention the difficulty of extrapolating from knowledge of the individual psyche to the mass psyche of a nation. Long is mindful of some of these difficulties, and he seeks to go beyond positivist and individualist psychology to a materialist understanding that centers a sociohistorical conception of society grounded particularly in a notion of ‘alienation’ drawn from Marxist, decolonial and critical theory. Long's ambition is complicated by his desire to transcend academic discourse to produce a psychohistory of South Africa that is accessible to all. In writing for a popular audience there is an inevitable risk of over-simplification of complex social phenomena. He also has difficulty with balancing the tension between adopting a critical psychosocial view of the complexity of a putatively egalitarian South African society, and a reductionist tendency to psychologize social phenomena. In addition, there is the issue of Long's own class and racial positioning. While the author offers a personal take on events, he is reticent about his origins and how his upbringing in a particular niche in South African society might have influenced his positionality.
Long begins with a heartfelt plea on behalf of the most vulnerable people in South Africa, women, children, and refugees, who are ‘frequently the victims of unspeakable interpersonal violence’ (p. 9). In his own work at a university clinic, he has witnessed ‘the cocktail of trauma, deprivation, and destructiveness’ (p. 10) present in the lives of many working-class and economically marginal patients. The core problem he seeks to address is repetition:
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