ABSTRACT
Therapeutic discourses on ‘healing’ the individual, social and political legacy of
apartheid violence were intrinsic to South Africa’s reconciliation process. In
its public performance of reconciliation and throughout its final documentation
and recommendations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and
many of those who came to speak before it, expressed reconciliation by recourse
to psychotherapeutic metaphors, such as ‘healing’, and the technologies of
the testimonial and the confessional. These shaped the assumptions central to
reconciliation, namely, that the TRC was mandated to heal the individual and social
body and to repair the national psyche, assumptions that were compounded by the
co-presence of Christian discourses on forgiveness. These discourses framed the
submissions of victims and perpetrators to the TRC and conditioned the social and
political process of recasting the past, within which reconciliation was sought, and
the material practices – granting amnesty to perpetrators and reparations to victims
– by which reconciliation was thought to be instituted.
