SAPC Conference 2016

Molweni,

We are pleased to say that we have had a very good response to our SAPC National Conference. Bookings are going fast and furious and many people have commented enthusiastically about the rich and diverse conference programme. Thank you all for your support and encouragement.

For those who have not yet booked and who are concerned about costs, here are a number of options that might make the decision easier:

1. Group rates: For 5 or more registrations we are offering a reduced registration of – R1,800 per person/ R650 per student
2. For out of town people we have retained the early-bird fee to compensate for the extra costs incurred
3.  CPD points (both normal CEU’s and ethics points) have been applied for.
4. The AGM on the Sunday is intended as a cost-saving strategy, saving on travel costs. If you need to represent your group at the AGM you may be able to negotiate a travel subsidy from your group?
5. We would like to remind you that skyping is another way in which you can participate in the AGM if your situation does not allow you to attend in person. Please alert us if you will be skyping in to the AGM meeting so that we can make the necessary technical provisions.

We encourage you all to attend the Cocktail Party on the Friday 28th October.

• We are in the process of securing an address by an Official of the Western Cape Health Department
• Bea Wirz  bwirzct@gmail.com and Siobhan Sweeney Siobhan@humannature.co.za are busy organising a SAPC Poster Display of our members’ diverse psychoanalytic work.
• Nicky Jordan nicolettecjordan@gmail.com is setting up a book display of our memberships publications.
• Enzo Sinisi enzo@hixnet.co.za  is setting up an innovative COG initiative facilitating the ongoing dialogue between members before, during and after the conference.
• Dain Peters and Candice Dumas have been developing and fundraising for the piloting of new SAPC Video Award Project. In support of this, there will be a screening of 4 short videos created by the UCT students.

Many thanks to all of these members for all of their hard work!  As you can see the cocktail party promises to be a lively event. It is scheduled to end at 19h15 so that still gives you time to proceed with your normal Friday evening plans or, even better, of devising other ways to continue the evening together with out of town colleagues. Such networking is particularly central to this SAPC initiative.

Make sure you don’t miss out by booking soon to attend the cocktail party and by supporting these efforts by contributing your posters, publications and signing up for the COG initiative.

We are looking forwarding to see you all at the Conference.

Best wishes

SAPC Conference Committee

I recently encountered a situation that fully revealed my male privilege in the midst of a South African society dominated by patriarchal structure. The whole incident left me feeling disconsolate, puzzled, and embarassed. 

I had entered into the men’s toilet area of a shopping centre in my area. The time of day was late morning, and the lavatory was occupied by only two people; a male using the urinal, and a cleaner wiping the mirror and walls. This is what one might expect to find in any number of shopping centre toilet areas, yet this scene was unique in one key construction- the cleaner was a woman.

I was momentarily halted by this occurrence as a swathe of  thoughts and emotions circulated in my being. What’s going on? Did the guy see that the cleaner is female? Should I ask her to leave? How does she feel about being here? I need to use the facilities, should I just use them as per normal even in her presence? These blitzed through my mind in a concoction of entanglement until I decided to follow my base instinctual drives and relieve myself, partially in her view but completely in her presence. After washing my hands and exiting the scene stayed rooted firmly in my conscious mind with added reflection and emotion. 

What happened was clearly an emboldened violation of Women’s Rights. Currently in South Africa National Women’s Month (August) where Women’s Day (9th of August) is commemorated as an historic 40 year young event where women of all races marched to the Union Buildings to petition against our country’s pass document laws. Liberation from legislative discrimination is still slowly spreading into the realms of society where day-to-day interpersonal changes are most needed. Our treatment of women is still incredibly violent, and silencing.

 Furthermore, the eerie ‘naturalness’ of the scene fortified a hegemonic structure that is quintessentially violent in it’s treatment of the female body. She quickly turned her head away when men entered the toilet, as we all remained silent to this interaction. It reminded me of how we silence mostly through our actions stronger than our words, and the act is so visceral that it can be felt in your body long after the initial event.  The observations I made of my violent behaviour clearly displayed that at a change-effecting level, we (as men) are perhaps the most destructive beings that have inhabited the planet Earth. Aside from all the perversions of nature that we have enacted in the forms of weapons, chemicals, processed foods, and machinery, our brazen responses to obviously immoral situations is in need of further transformation. 

I then delved into the sheer indignity of what was going on. The man who was there before I exited left without washing his hands while she cleaned urine residue from the surfaces. It seemed to mirror some aspects of the domestic situation where the Woman dutifully abides by cleaning up after her male partner, children, fathers, and brothers. We unacknowledge this by literally ‘pissing on’ her accomplishments, and going with the misguided expectation that we will always be cleaned after. This point is probably the most poignant considering where South Africa is currently located in contextual terms. Our President, accused of rape in 2006  admitted to having unprotected sex with Fezekile Kuzwayo (now known as Khwezi) who he knew to be HIV Positive but claimed that taking a shower immediately after sex reduced his risk of contracting the virus. The controversies surrounding the president’s phallus have been a source for wider debates, yet even with abstract interpretations one can deduce that the body of the female is the ultimate container for a man’s discharge; whether she consents or not. Supporters of Khwezi stood in Silent Protest as Zuma delivered his briefing at the closing of the IEC Conference on August 6th, glaringly unaware of what was happening in front of him (http://ewn.co.za/2016/08/06/Anti-rape-protesters-disrupt-Zumas-speech)

Picture: Thomas Holder EWN.

After being forceably ejected from the room, there was considerable backlash AGAINST the Silent Protesters from the African National Congress’s Women League. This would be surprising from all organisations, yet the Cadre’s of the Old Guard have declared themselves as ‘Zuma’s Women’, and have proudly declared to defend our President ‘with their buttocks’  http://www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2014/09/15/we-will-defend-with-our-buttocks-mokonyane . Yet again we see that the female body is an objectified mean’s to patriarchy’s end, even in perversion of sexual intercourse, by the protection of the phallus in public spaces. Essentially, it is strikingly similar to the silencing of the female voice with the male phallus as done so violently in the toilet area I stepped into. 

Bertrand Leopeng is a Counselling Psychologist, Training Psychoanalyst Provisional Candidate, and multipotentialite in Tshwane South Africa. He helped organise the Silent Protest 2015 at Wits University, and is interested in many diverse topics such as feminism, race, neuroplasticity, and mindfulness. https://bertrandleopengpsychology4all.wordpress.com/

tags- gender, violence, rape, South Africa, 

We are writing to remind you of the SAPC conference and to invite you and your group/s to think about how you will be participating.

We are very pleased to announce an early line-up of Participants that includes: Armien Abrahams, Astrid Berg, Amanda Kottler, Trevor Lubbe, Tshidi Maseko, Nomfundo Mogapi, Cora Smith and Sally Swartz.

The Early Bird Fee offers expires on 31 August 2016.  The full conference which runs from 12h30 – 17h15 on Friday 28 October and 08h30 – 17h15 on Saturday 29 August costs R1 800 – online registrations at www.sapc.org.za.

The national conference of a confederation like SAPC offers a unique opportunity for dialogue between the diverse psychoanalytic traditions and practices represented across groups.   We are delighted to …

​

… report that we have had a good response to our request for Abstracts.  We are planning longer plenary and shorter parallel sessions with panel discussions as well. There is still time for you to send in that abstract or to encourage a colleague to – the deadline has been extended to 7 August 2016.

Our Programme is taking shape – Under the Couch and Country banner, we have decided on two panel discussions:

Friday 28 October 2016 – discussants will engage with the topic What holds us, how it fails and how we fill the gaps.  This panel offers the opportunity for members of groups to present and interrogate the  models and theories that inform our understanding of our South African social contexts,  and possibly contribute to our blind spots.  We hope that the panel and audience will explore the theme by drawing on both personal reflections and clinical experiences.

Saturday 29 October 2016 –  Politics and the Psychoanalytic practitioner. Using the text “Is Politics the last Taboo in Psychoanalysis?” (Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2004, vol. 2 pp 5-37), discussants will examine how our engagement with politics enters into our theories and our work.

The SAPC Video Award (Flyer attached) is an exciting pilot project which, emulating the successful IPA project, elicits short four-minute films dealing with public perception of psychoanalysis in this country. Winning films will be screened at the conference.  .

We’d like to use Posters to communicate visually information about the SAPC groups and work being done by our members. Many groups do have posters from the 2014 Colloquium – please let us know if you’d like to display a poster as we need to make display arrangements. Perhaps your group might want to put one together, if not dust your old one off!

With such an exciting diversity of panels, projects, presentations and papers we are anticipating a vibrant and stimulating conference.  We look forward to your participation – sign up now!

Enkosi,

SAPC Conference Organising Committee

As I write this post intended for the public and Psychoanalytic Community as a whole, I find myself asking the question- what took so long. The natural answers come to the conscious mind- I have been busy, I haven’t had time to formulate something coherent, ‘life keeps getting in the way’. These are all reasonable to some degree of truth, but they also mask deeper explanations about the difficulties in starting something new. Interestingly enough, the process of even coming up with these reasons is what Freud calls rationalization and it is used as a means for us to logically explain why we do certain behaviours or engage in certain acts.

However, rationalization takes us away from the true meaning of our actions and this meaning lies beneath the surface, in our unconscious minds. The unconscious is always present in our everyday lives and is often a motivating factor for our behaviours. We repeat these same patterns on a daily basis, and sometimes fail to realise why they do more harm than good.

We also fail to release that there can be a feeling of stagnancy or repetitiveness due to our inability (or unwillingness) to understand the meaning behind our behaviours. I have been experiencing this stagnancy in relation to the visibility of Psychoanalytic thinking in public discourse such as the media. The, perhaps controversial, truth is that maybe we have become too accustomed to accepting the current state of events within our community and challenging them rouses uncomfortable feelings in the unconscious. I speak here of:

• Maintaining the status quo.
• Apartheid, Racism.
• Exclusivity of the field.
• Separation of scope of practice, creating divisions within.
• The maintaining of ideals which are detrimental for helping us to be aware of reality.

Confronting these issues on a personal basis has also been complex to engage with, as they seem to raise more issues and demand more meaning-making. As a community under constant scrutiny in South Africa, we as Psychoanalytic Practitioners/Thinkers/Activists should attempt to reveal the more indiscernible elements of our society and interpret them in ways that we can all understand. Ultimately, the unconscious plays a significant role in our interactions and ability to comprehend, and we should not be all too shy of engaging with the truths about our profession. Over the next coming posts we will engage with these issues more deeply, and see if we can depart from repetitiveness into responsiveness and awareness

Bertrand Leopeng 

SAPC Media Portfolio Executive Committee

BA (Wits), BA Hons (Wits), MA Counselling Psychology (Wits). 

This blog post series will be presented as frequently as possible and will include many contributions from various authors.

Blaming and punishing instead of guiding and helping sexually active adolescents is an ages old victimising custom which lets parents, other caregivers, family and broader society off the hook. This custom contributes to the continuing denial of infantile and childhood sexuality which needs to be nurtured and protected rather than acted on and awakened too early by adult carers.

Toddlers and young children need appropriate information at all ages about sexual matters in order to develop into adolescents who start experimenting with relationships, so that they can become adults who lead healthy lives which are also sexually fulfilling. From young, children need careful and mindful assistance as they get to know their own bodies. Children also need to learn touching themselves in a sexual way is fine but needs to happen in private.

Apart from loving and thoughtful care by family, parents and other adult carers, children may view all forms of inappropriate touching or play by adults or other children with a healthy suspicion. All children need to be enabled to say no to such emotional or bodily intrusion from the moment that they can indicate their non-consent. Adult carers need to become much more attuned to babies’ healthy ability to say no when being passed on to hands that feel unsafe. Instead of extinguishing this response, they need to affirm it so it becomes entrenched.

Once children feel in control of their sexuality they can grow into adolescents who are informed about their experimentation and sexual choices. Informed and protected adolescents will in most instances be able to protect themselves against inappropriate advances from others or going too far against their will with a peer.

The father of modern day psychology, Sigmund Freud, evoked strong reactions in the 1900s when he revealed that children are sexual and need their adult carers to protect rather than prematurely awaken their sexuality. Despite many advances in the field of reproductive health since then and especially in the last 50 years, society’s denial of children’s sexuality is still broadly in place. Today parents still do not discuss sexual issues with their children. Nor do they give them information about puberty and adolescence and the tumultuous changes that will occur in their minds and bodies as they mature. Inappropriate sexual handling of babies and children, which can result in premature sexual activity in adolescents, still remains rife today because it is hidden.

Children’s open interest in sexuality changes and retreats into privacy when they enter primary school. At this stage, older children begin to prefer to stick to friendships with children of their own gender. At puberty boys and girls (who generally mature before boys of the same age) become curious about touching, feeling and kissing a girl or boy they are attracted to. Sometimes these encounters result in having sex, especially when children are not consciously aware of their growing sexual interest or when a culture of mutual consent is not inculcated. Very often young adolescents who become sexually active have been sexualised before when they were not ready to be sexually active. They battle to fight their very strong sexual urges to be sexually active partly because of the intensity of their physical impulse, also because they confuse physical attentions with love and care.

Instead of trying to understand why adolescents become sexually active prematurely society behaves punitively towards them, as if young people should have known better, as if their bodies do not belong to themselves and they therefore do not deserve to be informed about them, as if they should not repeat patterns laid down unconsciously by their parents and grandparents and the other generations that preceded them.

Many an adult woman can today still remember how the arrival of her first period was greeted with great suspicion, how it was equated with sexual activity. Yesterday’s adolescents at times also share how they were humiliated requesting contraception. It’s public knowledge that many adolescents die and are damaged in risky traditional initiation ceremonies. All of which point to the existence of punitive, even unconsciously murderous, practices that persist and hurt adolescents.

Instead of rigidifying the victimisation of adolescents into law society needs broad educational programmes for all adult carers of children and adolescents that can help them guide and protect their charges. These programmes also need to focus on individual psychology because we will not achieve the needed change if there is no examination of how individuals’ sexuality is shaped both consciously and unconsciously.

A focus on the psychology of the individual will also help foster a broad understanding of how sexual coercion and violence come about – that those who coerce and abuse also experienced coercion and abuse at some, often early, point in their lives and that they are perpetuating patterns that will be transmitted from one generation to the next. These patterns can only be changed if both victims and offenders are helped to understand how their behaviours came about.

We should all contribute to bring about a broad, multidisciplinary approach aimed at guiding, protecting and cherishing adolescent sexuality which ensures the survival of humankind.

Written by Vossie Goosen (clinical psychologist, SAPC member and former journalist and editor of publications in NGO’s.

Email: vossiem@mweb.co.za)

At the recent Daily Maverick Gathering, prominent economist Iraj Abedian, of Pan-African Capital Holdings, proposed that whenever the underlying value system of a society is diluted or destroyed, corruption appears. In a heterogeneous society, he says, when the moral system is not defined and internalised when, for instance, integrity is not prioritised, corruption and crime occur.

A topical demonstration of his argument is seen in the recent Oscar Pistorius trial where the state prosecutor has made a point of highlighting the accused’s apparent inability to take responsibility for a string of incidents, and therefore, by implication, that he won’t take responsibility for murdering his girlfriend.

The notion of an individual not taking responsibility seems to have resonated strongly with many people.

Another poster boy for this lack of accountability is President Zuma. Both Pistorius and Zuma seem unable to restrain themselves or to take responsibility for their actions. They seem to have failed to internalise certain values that society insists on and have provoked much (self-righteous) outrage in society. It seems meaningful that the outrage around these two role-models should be so prominent in our country at present. What does it mean?

However, Abedian warns against the scapegoating of individuals or structures, emphasising the fact that these crimes could not occur without the support of a system which was itself riddled with corruption. He suggests that, while much of our attention is currently preoccupied with the corruption of the South African government and politicians, it must be remembered that the corruption is systemic and that no social organ is immune. All social units: academic, business, religious, even family, are implicated. He laments that there is much denial and, at times, defensiveness around this widespread corruption in society. “We know it but don’t discuss it and deal with it.”

The act of scapegoating is the process of projecting onto someone else unwanted aspects of ourselves. When we project our unwanted bits on others we tend to become enthralled by them, either with desire or disgust. Originally the goats were then eliminated, one was sacrificed and the other chased into the wilderness. Very often such scapegoating permits certain structural contradictions in society to remain unchallenged and this is how the term has come to be used. By such scapegoating, neglect, and complicity, structural and systemic corruption is allowed to fester within the body politic of the society. These include our attitudes towards, for instance, authority, gender, and wealth.

In both individuals and, it seems, in countries, such an experience is an attempt to redefine oneself more accurately and to set new limits that are broad enough to include greater diversity. Perhaps these current events under consideration are an invitation for us to hold both ourselves and our social structures more to account, rather than being mesmerised by scapegoats. This is not to say that such processes are not very expensively achieved. They are rarely without crisis and often involve great tragedy, as we are witnessing currently. What this emphasises is that we seem to need greater wholeness at any cost. We are compelled to take back our projections even if it involves great suffering.

A society bedevilled by systemic corruption, Abedian asserts, has a shortage of coherent ethical values. In other words it has had its centre knocked out. There is a lack of central agreement on a set of values. This creates a precarious position, the centre cannot hold. It destroys confidence in both self and the other, reducing the possibility of real relationship. Economically, he says, without this coherent and internalised set of defining moral values we fall short of social capital (even if we have financial and human capital) and our success as a country can proceed only in fits and starts. It cannot realise its true potential, it cannot be truly responsive and adaptive to circumstances. Any advances are ultimately unsustainable.

Individually when we lose our centres we tend to grasp at the external, heroic, and material, either by embodying these qualities ourselves or by worshipping them in others. Public opinion fills the vacuum and we tend to become reactive and impulsive rather than responsive. Substance abuse may become a way of dealing with the insecurity. While we long for connection, stability and belonging, we may find it increasingly difficult to commit to long-term relationships (in work and love), and tend towards quick-fixes, often using sex as an antidote for the lack of intimacy. While we long for guidance, we are sceptical of any authority and promote instead a self-sufficient individualism which is, paradoxically, conformist.

So, observing Pistorius and Zuma’s desperate and tragic attempts to maintain their particular false constructions of their selves, with their respective compensations of fast cars, beautiful women and big homesteads, we may allow ourselves to become a little dubious about these aspirations. The notions of responsibility and restraint have become prominent talking points in certain sectors of social media. These are not hip and groovy qualities and it is interesting that they have found traction. Certainly the juxtaposition of these two personages, Jacob and Oscar, encompass a great range of our diversity and perhaps it is this universality that has had some leverage of public opinion. Responsibility and restraint are certainly a great antidote to the tinseltown magic of the rags to riches stories that both these personages embody.

It seems helpful that such considerations, stimulated by the courtroom dramas and the approaching elections, draw such energy and become more prominent in social currency, and that these rather old-fashioned notions of restraint and responsibility become social memes. Rather than heroic celebrity, humanity becomes an aspiration and a guiding aesthetic. It is a process of being disillusioned into adulthood. After his death, it seems that we are now obliged to take back the positive qualities which we had projected onto Madiba, and it becomes apparent that the task of taking back our projections and becoming more human involves not only humbly taking ownership of our fallibility but also confidently reclaiming our beauty.

Perhaps, then, as a country with such a lauded Constitution sitting at the centre of its stated values, this is the process of the country internalising the value system from the ground up. As Sisonke Msimang argued so compellingly (also at the DM Gathering), we need to realise, sadly, that we aren’t exceptional. We cannot be protected from suffering. We have to do the work. With consciousness, compassion and courage and a little bit of luck, perhaps we can gradually learn to become human.

Written by Dain Peters (clinical psychologist, Jungian Analyst, SAPC member. Email: dgpeters@absamail.co.za)

As I write this (15/01/14) we are just over 40 days after the death of Nelson Mandela. Forty Days: the magical time period, the time for which great mystics (Moses, Jesus and Mohammed) exiled themselves in preparation for significant changes; the 6-week time period when, in crisis theory, the old status quo is in dangerous flux and most available for adjustment; the time (960 hours) it takes, according to some traditions, to form a new habit. In many cultures, the 40 day period after someone’s death is marked by a ritual. This confluence of thinking around the 40 day period would suggest some sort of universal, archetypal knowledge about the nature of our adjustment to new realities.

In her poem When Great Trees Fall, Maya Angelou writes

Great souls die and 
our reality, bound to 
them, takes leave of us.
 Our souls, 
dependent upon their 
nurture, 
now shrink, wizened.
 Our minds, formed
 and informed by their
 radiance, 
fall away.
 We are not so much maddened
 as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
 caves.

As a country the last 40 days has felt like a time of inter-regnum, as if we were caught in the gap between certainties, where an old guiding symbol had died and a new one has yet to emerge. It has been a time of much jockeying and regrouping in the political landscape. This is the time when, according to Gramsci, a great many morbid symptoms appear. Politically, as has been much reported on, the ANC leadership, instead of being able to bask, as expected, in the reflected glory of its former leader, has seemed to be shown up and roundly scorned for its deficiencies. This seems to be a time of profound uncertainty, especially in the run-up to this year’s elections, in which splitting and polarising will be resorted to as a way to simplify the unbearable, a regression to an earlier mode of functioning where we feel alone in a threatening world. The loss of Mandela highlights just how tentative and fragile is a sense of hope that is rooted in one individual. I suppose this also holds for institutions, religions and for the formation of new political parties. For many people globally the unique individual personage of Mandela facilitated the loosening of defensiveness and prejudice, stimulating a new and welcomed sense of our common humanity. However there is a shadow-side to this. In the global idolising of Nelson Mandela as the exceptional individual, we may have inadvertently entrenched the opposite rule, prejudice or fear, as is the nature of splitting. It certainly seems that, in the death of this great individual who carried all of our hopes and dreams we have, in these past 40 days, as a nation, been reduced, bereft to the “unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves”.

In therapy we see this often where the hard-won intimacy of the therapeutic relationship has not yet generalised outside the borders of the therapy room. Instead, what our work seems to have highlighted is the dark, cold, absence of genuine relatedness outside of the therapy room. For a time the exception proves the rule, until it generalises and we gradually feel less alone in the world and more capable of mutual concern. So, after our 40-days in a cave, perhaps this is now an opportunity for us to open our eyes and to dare to be more awake, alive and more human.

Angelou continues:

And when great souls die, 
after a period peace blooms, 
slowly and always
irregularly.  Spaces fill
with a kind of
 soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed.  They existed.
 We can be.  Be and be 
better.  For they existed.

Written by Dain Peters (Clinical Psychologist and Jungian Analyst; SAPC member. Email: dgpeters@absamail.co.za)

Moving through the sky, at great speed, and under control of an unknown, albeit trained person is for many, scary.

Its not natural for humans to fly. This fear is a normal fear because it comes from an instinct to live and avoid being in a dangerous place. This instinct is seen in small babies or animals who will not crawl over a glass table because they know they can fall and be hurt. Being cautious and thoughtful is what we all need, to live safely.

Flying in an airplane evokes for some, primitive fears to do with death and trust. Flying may remind someone that they are vulnerable to dying, something they hadn’t thought deeply about before. Worries about how a person dies can also be triggered when flying. Some worry about dying frightened, falling, unable to breathe or just in pain. Independent people who avoid vulnerable situations don’t care about the moment of death, but whether they are able to trust another person like the pilot, to keep them safe.

There are other levels of meaning to this difficulty because it triggers other underlying issues and earlier experiences. Trusting another person with your life is a huge feat and relates to reliability of parents and caregivers. The fear of falling can mean being dropped emotionally or physically. Feeling very small in relation to the earth below and stars above may be hard for some to bear.

Flying in an airplane can be for some so overwhelming that it makes travel impossible. They lose out on having lovely experiences. It isn’t always possible to just be brave and courageous. People use all kinds of methods to manage their fear of flying such as meditation, self talk and self medicating with alcohol or using prescribed sleeping pills. Another method is to be slowly introduced to the fearful situations like flying. Unfortunately, these methods don’t always work. Often a deeper process is needed in conjunction with these methods. For these people psycho-analytic psychotherapy is very effective. This helps people to understand and work through the ideas and feelings underneath the fear so that the real upset, not a worry about flying, gets to be soothed and healed.

Written by Cathy Rogers (clinical social worker and SAPC member). Visit www.cathyrogers.co.za

People these days, if they can afford it, are often more connected to their smart phones, i-pads, and laptops than they are to other living beings. While social networking sites like Facebook aim to connect people in cyberspace, they can actually leave us more physically alone and lonely. Social isolation often goes hand in hand with depression. People who are depressed are more likely to isolate themselves and being socially isolated can contribute towards depression.

Because the internet is so recent and it is constantly changing, we don’t yet know about its long-term impact on us as people. We have yet to discover how our total reliance on IT effects our mood, attention, concentration, thought patterns, ability to delay gratification, our style of communicating and our relationships with others.

Like anything else, the internet can be used for good and for bad. It has helped us to make great strides in education, health care and improving lives. It allows us to equip ourselves with knowledge that is empowering and beneficial in so many different ways. But it can also be used destructively to attack, deceive, steal and hurt others. Part of our adjustment to this new technological world is about learning how to avoid these dangers, in a similar way that we learn not to walk down dark alleyways at night.

We know for sure though that the internet, social networking sites and smart phones are not going to go away – they are only getting smarter, faster and more addictive. They can be good for mental health but they can also be bad for it. The challenge for us all is to use the internet to improve our lives, to learn, grow and stay connected to others in a meaningful way. But we do need to be aware of the dangers, and we should recognise when it’s time to unplug, disconnect from technology and reconnect with ourselves and others.

What kind of impact has the internet had on your mental health?

Written by Jenny Perkel (clinical psychologist, SAPC member). Visit www.jennyperkel.com, www.childreninmind.co.za, www.babiesinmind.co.za, www.twitter.com/jennyperkel or email: jenny@perkel.co.za

Freud placed great emphasis on people becoming consciously aware of previously repressed material during psychoanalysis. Remembering repressed memories or becoming mindful of unconscious material was a central component of Freud’s therapeutic approach[i]. This sentiment was echoed by Carl Jung in stressing the importance of making that which was unconscious conscious in psychotherapy. In psychoanalytic therapy today exploring and understanding a patient’s unconscious dynamics via free association, dreams and the transference forms an integral part of everyday practice. Yet numerous patients struggle with this specific task in therapy. It is simply too painful for some and they retreat, many terminating therapy at this point. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge and deal with their painful psychic realities. I remember facing certain realities about myself in my own therapy and how painful that process was. The journey of seeking out those unconscious gods that hold sway over our lives is one of peril. Jung, one of the great explorers of the unconscious issues the following warning to those who seek knowledge about the self: “There is no coming to consciousness without pain”[ii]. As I invite patients on a daily basis to explore and confront their shadow, I am many times reminded of the mythic Norse tale of King Gylfe and his journey towards Asgard, the home of the gods.

A great many hundreds of years after the creation of the world, there ruled a wise king whose name was Gylfe. He was a seeker after wisdom and finding that no man could answer the questions which he was continually asking himself, Gylfe made the long journey to Asgard, thinking to learn the secrets of the gods. The gods have often visited men, but men have rarely visited the gods, and the King’s coming to Asgard was the beginning of a new wisdom among men. No sooner did he enter the home of the gods than he found himself in a great hall. Then Odin, spoke in a deep and wonderful tone and asked why he had come there? He replied boldly that he wanted to find a wise man if there were one. Then Odin answered him in words which were so full of meaning that he did not understand them until long afterwards: “You shall not go from this place unharmed unless you go wiser than you came.” It is dangerous to seek the gods, unless we profit by what they tell us; for it is better to be ignorant than to possess knowledge and not live by it.[iii]

In seeking out our unconscious gods we need to confront unsettling and at times painful memories, thoughts and feelings. Odin’s cautionary warning is a stark reminder to all of us involved in helping people along this journey. Maybe in the future psychotherapists should have Odin’s warning enshrined on a plaque above their practice doors: “You shall not go from this place unharmed unless you go wiser than you came.” I for one am considering it. We as psychoanalytic therapists and patients will do good to remember his wise words.

Written by Henry Meiring (clinical psychologist, SAPC member). Find Henry on www.centurycitypsychology.co.za or follow him on www.twitter.com/hjmeiring 

References [i]             Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through,” in vol. 12 of Standard Edition the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. And trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalyis, 1958). [ii]             Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy,” in vol. 12 of Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Pantheon, 1953) [iii]             Hamilton Wright Mabie, “Norse Mythology: Great stories from the Eddas,” (New York: Dover Publications, 2002)