Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa

Professor Chabani Manganyi presets his memoir, Apartheid and the Making of a Black Psychologist (2016), in Mavambe – a place he calls home. He graduates to the less rural and rustic hospital of Baragwanath Hospital (now Chris Hani Baragwanath Academic Hospital), on the somewhat periphery of the South Western Township (Soweto). While on the periphery, it is certainly the heart of Soweto’s health needs and in the heart of Sowetans respectively. He notes his problematic and painful exclusion from Tara Hospital early in his memoir, which is significantly different and displaced from the two former contexts. I am deeply familiar, from vivid and visceral personal and professional experiences, with these milieus. However, I recognise the striking paradox between his and my own experiences of these contexts, as a Black psychologist currently employed at Tara Hospital. I recognise that a reading of the memoir would lift as many consensual themes as it would idiosyncratic reflections, including an important reflection on the marginal man and the exilic state experienced in Manganyi’s pursuit of becoming one of the first Black psychologists.

Researchers using qualitative methods are required to be ethically mindful not to cause harm to participants. However, when emotional encounters between researchers and participants occur there are inherent ethical tensions that need to be continuously navigated. In this paper I contemplate the challenges I encountered whilst using a psychoanalytically informed research interview method (adapted from Cartwright, 2004; Kvale, 1999; Stromme, Gullestad, Stänicke & Killingmo, 2010). I interviewed women on the topic of maternal subjectivity when their children have a disability. The ethical quandaries included accessing nuanced data by engaging with participants’ unconscious material; as well as the use of the transference-countertransference situation outside of a psychotherapy setting. Literature has previously discussed the ethics of using this psychoanalytic method, particularly around the interpretation of data from a psychoanalytic lens. However, the aim in this paper is focused on the 35 application of psychoanalytic concepts in the process of data collection and how to ethically manage these emotional engagements with participants. It will be argued that when researchers are also mindful, psychoanalytically-trained psychotherapists, who engage with their own subjectivity in personal psychoanalytic psychotherapy, this psychoanalytic inquiry method can be a very ethical way of being with participants.

The first issue of Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy in South Africa for 2017 covers areas with which psychotherapists commonly struggle, namely: working with psychosis, the ethics of psychoanalytic research methods and thinking about race and the legacies of racial trauma - a topic that is currently top of mind in our country. As diverse as these subjects are, their pertinence is striking for our profession at a time when mental health services, and particularly psychoanalytic psychotherapists, are being required to fight for relevance within an uncertain and resource-scarce context.