ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic practice has been consistently challenged in South Africa as having failed to prove its credentials as “evidence-based” and “solution-focused.” Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is largely unavailable to the majority of South Africans in need of mental health interventions. Its slow unfolding over years rather than months is expensive and unsustainable for individuals and families for whom short-term relief is urgent. Further, its reputation as being irrelevant because of its lack of rootedness in an African context has been cemented by its identification over decades with white middle-class practitioners and clients. Its persistent presence has thus become a marker of the obduracy of white privilege. There are two parts to the argument that follows. One concerns the intractability of the colonial past, and the traumatic ways in which it is repeated, and how these repetitions might contribute to efforts to find new ways to go forward. The second part of the argument turns to the genealogy of primitivity and gender and race binaries as concepts running through foundational texts in psychoanalytic theory. Thinking through the implications of these concepts is essential for a decolonial project. The chapter will conclude with some thoughts about the contribution of the Winnicottian lens to undoing the colonial knottedness of psychoanalytic theory.
