Reverie and Internalized Colonizers: A South African Perspective Sally Swartz with Fakhry Davids (respondent)

This is the latest in the current series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series so far has intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to the academic decolonial work. This seminar focuses on the clinical encounter, and how the legacy of colonialism affects the dynamics of the therapeutic relationship. Is it possible to 'decolonise psychoanalysis'?

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Abstract - Sally Swartz

This paper is about colonial states of mind. The legacy of colonialism, so apparent in the material and social world, also lives on in the distortions of subjectivity brilliantly described in the works of Frantz Fanon and others. The decolonial project in psychoanalysis requires from practitioners political and social engagement, theoretical flexibility, and a commitment to throwing off chains that bind us all to colonial states of mind.

The paper suggests that developing a decolonial psychoanalytic practice has three substantial areas of activity. Firstly, we must grapple with the colonial legacies of our theories and strive for epistemic justice. Secondly, we must engage in social and political activism that challenges racist institutional practices. Finally we need to find ways to think freely in every psychoanalytic session, everywhere. It is with this last condition that the paper is primarily concerned.

The paper will begin by describing the difficulty involved in recognizing ongoing colonial influences in psychoanalytic practice. It will then set out optimal conditions for reverie. Working in South Africa is the context for this discussion, in which decolonizing inner life involves grappling with power, submission and surrender in the intimacy of the psychoanalytic situation. It means being receptive to states of radical uncertainty, and open to new definitions of hospitality. These are states of mind that are open to the impossibility and necessity of being - in Bion’s terms - without memory or desire. Case material will be used to illustrate the argument.

Speakers’ Biographies

Emeritus Associate Professor Sally Swartz (University of Cape Town) is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist, and the author of a number of papers on the critical importance of attunement to the ways in which society, politics and class fundamentally shape unconscious lives, and also therefore all clinical encounters. She has a particular interest in the fields of colonialism and decolonization in psychoanalytic theory. Homeless Wanderers: Movement and Mental Illness in the Cape Colony in the Nineteenth Century was published by UCT Press in 2015, and Ruthless Winnicott: The Role of Ruthlessness in Psychoanalysis and Political Protest by Routledge in 2019. In 2022 she published Psychoanalysis and Colonialism: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge).

Fakhry Davids is a training analyst of the British Psychoanalytical Society and a member of the Tavistock Society of Psychotherapists. He trained as a clinical psychologist in South Africa, and has an abiding interest in the psychology of racism. His book Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference (2011) presented an original theory of the psychology of racism and was a major contribution to how we understand what happens in the mind of those engaged in or experiencing racism, both in the consulting room and the ‘outside world’. He is in full-time clinical practice and teaches, supervises and lectures widely. He is a founding board member of Partners in Confronting Collective Atrocities (PCCA), which adapts group relations methods to process the aftermath of mass atrocities such as the Holocaust and the Palestinian Nakba.

Sally Swartz's book Psychoanalysis and Colonialism points to a future for psychoanalysis which is genuinely anti-colonial . In the South African context it entails dismantling barriers to the kind of reverie that might allow both patient and analyst to traverse unconscious landscapes scattered with the debris of colonial trauma. More broadly, she asks whether psychoanalysis and other talking therapies can embody an anti-racist approach in their clinical practice and theorising.

Image caption
The image above by Anastasya Eliseeva is a painting of K Sello Duiker (1974-2005), a South African novelist whose books Thirteen Cents and The Quiet Violence of Dreams ‘were instrumental in starting something of a literary subgenre in South African writing about young black males coming undone in Cape Town.’ (Rofhiwa Maneta) Illustrator: Anastasya Eliseeva With permission of New Frame (South Africa)