Nation on the Couch - Inside South Africa's Mind
"Unwilling to accept the damage that has been done, guiltiness prevents white people from loving the Other" Extract from - Nation on the Couch, by Wahbie Long.
Uncertain of their place in civic life, many whites have withdrawn gradually from public spaces into fortified enclaves. The steady erosion of whiteness has produced a sense of loss and confusion: as per Suchet’s analysis, a melancholic structure is replacing what was once a narcissistic veneer — that familiar, easy-going confidence that comes with ontological security collapsing under the weight of a now paralytic grief.
Despite the end of apartheid failing to bring about significant changes in the distribution of material resources, the passage of time has still exposed the fragility of whiteness. No longer do black people submit to the white subject’s fantasy: they are exiting the dialectic en masse, leaving the madam and master without a raison d’être. Instead of stepping into the void between whiteness and blackness, many white people have simply battened down the hatches, retreating still further into their whiteness: they live (barely) in Kojève’s existential impasse, refusing to recognise black people and, unable to resolve their grief, cling stubbornly to their lost object — their past glories — just as Freud’s melancholics once did. Cape Town’s avant-garde scene is a worthy example of this kind of throwback behaviour. In the traditionally black suburbs surrounding the city — the historic Salt River, Woodstock and Bo-Kaap are foremost among them — gentrification is gathering pace. Families that have lived in these areas for generations have been pushed out by rising taxes as white speculators move in, ‘cleaning up the streets’ as they buy up rows of properties. Houses are demolished and then rebuilt; others are converted into repurposed warehouses or farm-style markets selling anything from craft beers to artisanal foods and vintage clothing. The old is reworked as the new, with places like the Old Biscuit Mill and the Oranjezicht City Farm Market turning into spaces where white people go to relax. In these trendy surrounds, people of colour are very much at a premium; one is forgiven for thinking that this is no longer Africa.
In psychoanalytic terms, what is underway here is a process of disavowal: white South Africans know what is happening but they still believe — or, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.”243 A ready example is that of the child who has just discovered that Father Christmas does not really exist. The child, too, disavows this knowledge, pretending for one more year that there is still a little magic left in the world as it unpacks the contents of Santa’s stocking the following morning. By the same token, the disavowal of disenchanted whites is supported by a culture of fetishism as a type of white man’s Neverland begins to take shape. The commodity comes to represent what has been lost: the target of powerful identifications, it is readily converted into a fetish.
The nineteenth-century revolutionary Karl Marx described the commodity fetish as involving an expropriation of workers’ labour-power, which then magically reappears in the products of their labour.
The candlestick holder, for example, is cherished because of its quaintness; the timepiece is desired for the name emblazoned across its face — value does not derive from the hours of concrete labour that went into making these items. Following Straker’s line of argument, it may be that white South Africans manage their experience of lack and loss through fetishism, their castrated whiteness affirmed and negated simultaneously.245 Locked away in their gated communities — a symbol of what relational psychoanalyst Stephen Mitchell calls an “internal protection racket” — commodities overcome them in splendid isolation, this their defence against the brittleness of whiteness.248 In its technical, psychoanalytic sense, perversion has entered the scene, the anxiety generated by lack papered over by the fetish.
At this point, the example of one of J.R.R. Tolkien’s most sordid characters, Gollum, springs to mind. Sméagol — as he was then known — murders his friend to steal the Ring, an object of cosmic importance that covers its wearer in a cloak of invisibility. The owner of the Ring enjoys malevolent powers too, such as mind control and an indefinite lengthening of the lifespan. But the Ring damages physical appearance if worn for extended periods of time. Since it contains the seed of his destruction, Gollum both loves and hates his ‘precious’, which, after half-a-millennium, has transformed him into a deformed freak. The Ring grows weary of Gollum and falls from his finger, finding a new owner in the shape of the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins. As for Gollum, he ends up chasing the Ring for the remainder of his years: “My precious!” becomes his signature sigh. He remains capable of moments of human connection, yet these are all too fleeting. In the end, he bites off the finger of Bilbo’s heir, Frodo, to reclaim the Ring; overbalancing in a maniacal celebration, he falls into the Crack of Doom where he meets with an infernal end.
Although Tolkien himself rejected allegorical readings of his work, The Lord of the Rings can still be viewed as a cautionary tale about the desire for unlimited power, the self-reinforcing logic that accompanies it and the corrosive effects this has on both the self and others. It is not without significance that Bilbo Baggins was the only Ring-bearer ever to relinquish it voluntarily — and even he barely escaped the Ring’s seductive whisperings. When it comes to renouncing their Ring of privilege, therefore, white people’s agonising is hardly atypical. The larger issue, however, is that this privilege, with its material, symbolic and psychological dimensions, has been built on the suffering of countless others. If there is still a chance for white redemption, it cannot be effected in private — on the contrary, it requires a long-overdue engagement with the much-avoided Other.
As South African sociologist Deborah Posel notes, “[r]ace is always a relational construct” — the meaning of whiteness both implies and depends on the meaning of blackness — but with black people refusing to endorse the historical terms of reference, many white people find themselves in psychic freefall, cut loose from what was once subjective and objective truth. A world that was — that felt — as if it were made in their image, threatens to unravel. Few topics generate as much heat in white circles as does land expropriation without compensation. Crime can be managed through a series of security barriers, black economic empowerment can be attenuated through legal loopholes, but losing one’s piece of heaven because a democratically elected government chooses to deprive one of it is a different proposition altogether. The sense of shock is palpable: white South Africa is used to “[a] world divided into compartments, a motionless, Manicheistic world, a world of statues: the statue of the general who carried out the conquest, the statue of the engineer who built the bridge; a world which is sure of itself, which crushes with its stones the backs flayed by whips: this is the colonial world”. Many continue to deny moral culpability for the horrors of the past: while apartheid was very bad indeed, “it is the fault of previous generations”, “I was not alive at the time”, or “I worked extremely hard for what I have in life”. In these instances, the white psyche resorts to a special type of defensiveness that psychoanalysts refer to as guiltiness, as distinct from its moral superior, guilt. Whereas the latter is a potential source of growth, guiltiness is “degraded … a private, static arrangement we make with ourselves to close off new experience”. Guiltiness reveals itself, moreover, through the selfish claims it makes on the Other-as-listener: “It’s in the past, you need to move on,” goes the mantra for absolution, leaving black people feeling gaslighted, as though all that was solid had just melted into air.
I have witnessed displays of guiltiness many times in my professional life as a psychologist which, as both colleagues and patients will know, implies a work setting dominated by women. Whether in group or individual encounters, I have noticed that guiltiness is usually enacted when a racial element colours an interaction — whether or not explicit reference is made to it. In these emotionally charged situations, one imagines the black woman will show the first sign of emotion yet, in my experience, she tends to sit impassively, revealing little. The history of this country has taught her to bury her racial trauma and to soldier on. Instead, it is the white woman who breaks down — a phenomenon once described to me (by a white woman, no less) as “the white woman’s tears”. When she could be listening actively to the pain being communicated in the room, she ends up collapsing in a heap. The group is now faced with what appears to be a straightforward choice: ignore the tears and flout a general rule of social intercourse, or respond to them as one would in any normal — let alone, therapeutic — situation. It opts usually for the latter route, fussing over the white woman as her pain takes centre stage, colluding with her in her effort to avoid taking responsibility for herself.
Unwilling to accept the damage that has been done, guiltiness prevents white people from loving the Other — it must, since love demands that we acknowledge the terrifying fullness of our own viciousness. Reflecting on this inability to mourn, relational psychoanalyst Adrienne Harris describes a gap in the white psyche that functions as “an imploding star, refusing signification”, where not only trauma, but also destructiveness, has been bleached out. In contrast, genuine guilt is about surrendering control by accepting responsibility for the inflicted suffering, and its ongoing disavowal through the commodity fetish and the grim stockpiling of economic power means that the psychosocial damage tearing away at the fabric of South African society will only worsen.
Wahbie Long, PhD is a clinical psychologist and associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cape Town. A Mandela Mellon fellow at Harvard University, he is a recipient of the Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for the History of Psychology.
Provocative, insightful and brilliantly written by Professor Wahbie Long, Nation on the Couch explores life in our beloved country through the lens of psychoanalysis. By focusing on the idea of a ‘political unconscious’, it argues that there is much to be learnt from excavating the inner life of South Africans, which can illuminate the external problems that beset us from all sides. It will challenge readers to rethink the way we see ourselves, why we do what we do and why we are who we are.
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