Counter-Recognition in Decolonial Struggle

Abstract

In decolonial struggle, there is an old colonial order that must be forever dismantled, with all its trimmings of unearned privilege, embedded in generations of wealth. There is a new order to be established, with new constellations of links with the global world. It is with this moment of significant social questioning, disruption, and revolution that this paper is concerned. Colonial situations, wherever they occur, affect our social and political lives deeply, and as they penetrate into our therapy rooms, with identities abraded and subjectivities set aslant with new light, it is urgent that we begin to grapple with their challenges to our skills and our theory. This paper addresses three aspects of this. First, the decolonial turn raises significant challenges for relational therapies. Second, far-reaching change to a social order evokes complex layers of trauma, and the ways in which we respond to these requires a reach beyond our own vulnerabilities, our retreat into the old familiar. Finally, the paper looks at the ways in which the writing of both Frantz Fanon and Donald Winnicott theories provide a way of making sense of this challenging clinical terrain.

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Notes on contributors

Sally Swartz

Sally Swartz, Ph.D., is in the University of Cape Town’s Psychology Department Training Faculty in the clinical psychology program at the Child Guidance Clinic and is a practicing psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She is a member of the Cape Town Psychoanalytic Self/Relational Psychology group and writes, teaches, and supervises from a relational psychoanalytic perspective. She has a particular interest in the ways in which psychoanalytic thinking might be used to reflect on and contain situations of political conflict and trauma.