ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the emotional impact of apartheid on children and adults. It explores some of the emotional consequences of apartheid as a sociopolitical system. The emotional damage is repaired when the individual moves beyond a defensive narcissism to a creative self-awareness, self-confidence and competence. The chapter explains that Menzies Lyth's model of containing anxiety in institutions applies equally to large-scale societies and that South Africa, like the authoritarian hospitals studied by Menzies Lyth, has to evolve from an emotionally anti-democratic ethos into an emotionally democratic one. In a comprehensive review of the emotional impact of violence upon children in South Africa, Andrew Dawes adopts a cognitive, social constructivist approach and is critical of a psychoanalytic approach. South Africa is still strongly collectivised and made up of many self-sealed groups. Dawes' criticisms of psychoanalysis are imperceptive and they provide no basis to improve research about traumatised children.
