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The edited volume, Psychodynamic Psychotherapy in South Africa, is concerned primarily with how psychoanalytic practitioners located outside of institutionalized psychoanalysis encounter difference in post-apartheid South Africa. Against theoretical “purism,” the volume offers “a new hybrid theoretical framework which interrogates the assumptions of current psychoanalytic theory and expands its scope to include non-Western collectivist notions of self and community” (p. 273). I focus here on the various ways in which the chapters work within the twin assumptions that, first, apartheid arrested a capacity for empathy between those it inscribed as different and, second, that empathy is cardinal for a post-apartheid psychoanalysis that bridges historical differences. These assumptions will certainly resonate with a readership beyond South Africa. They are also, I want to suggest, worth worrying over.
In the opening chapter, Sally Swartz writes of the “deeply paranoid anxiety that kept white and black apart” (p. 17) during apartheid. Swartz’s framing of the problem in intersubjective terms is subtle and alert to the pitfalls of Kohutian empathy, though the restoration of empathy remains “an important prerequisite for fundamental transformation” (p. 17) that informs the itinerary of the psychotherapeutic process she plots from a lack of empathy towards its possibility. In her contribution, Yvette Esprey, too, attends to histories of racism that affect the analytic dyad. Esprey writes that an “impulse to other and to discriminate has the potential to interrupt the therapeutic endeavor, where the aim is to find a resonance of alikeness and therefore a vehicle to empathy” (p. 39). Like Swartz, the version of empathy affirmed by Esprey is one that leaves the empathic subject altered, their own subjectivity refigured in the encounter with another. Glenys Lobban takes up this motif in a personal narrative in which she becomes, quite literally, “hybridized” through tracing her o