Trauma in South Africa: Psycho-Analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa

Many of the papers in Psycho-Analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa, the primary journal in South Africa that publishes articles on psychoanalysis, consciously explore the complex relationships between societal events in the external world and the development of the individual psyche. Apartheid, and South Africa's need to metabolize its effects, clearly shapes the context and much of the content of a number of the articles published in this journal over the last five years. As an African American recently graduated from an American psychoanalytic institute, I am particularly appreciative of attempts to illuminate the ways in which societal trauma shapes individual development across generations. In my experience, such formative dynamics are not often a focus of psychoanalytic education in the U.S., despite the historical realities of slavery, Jim Crow, and the immigration of many people displaced to America by war and social atrocities in many parts of the world. Therefore, I have chosen to abstract papers that elaborate on these themes that emerge in my clinical work with patients.1

Memories, Healing, Reconciliation, and Forgiveness. Leonia Kurgan, pp. 1-10.

This paper is written from the personal perspective of the author, who describes herself as “a child Holocaust survivor, a refugee,