Blog Post 1.
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.
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