A story of dislocated thinking

Abstract

This paper offers a narrative description of what it means to be an itinerant, clinical psychologist at the primary health care level in South Africa from an experience-near vantage point. Case material from the author’s community service year is drawn on to explore what happens when psychodynamically oriented thinking becomes: (a) displaced due to an absent or significantly modified analytic set-up and/or (b) disabled, largely as a defence against trauma. The hypothesis proffered is that these disruptions in thinking can be mitigated when the ‘thinking space’ represented by the psychologist, is also an itinerant one. Winnicott, Bion, Ogden and others will be used to illustrate relevant constructs such as reverie, containment and transitional phenomena, while psychoanalytic trauma theory will be drawn on to show how trauma can affect thinking.

Keywords:

• itinerant psychologist
• psychodynamic/psychoanalytic thinking
• trauma
• primary health care
• analytic frame
• apartheid

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Names and personal details have been changed in order to protect confidentiality.

2. The Western Cape is the third most populous South Africa’s nine provinces. Located at the South-western tip of Africa, it comprises an area of 49,950 sq miles. The capital is Cape Town and the main economic activities include agriculture (especially fruit), wine making, fishing and various industries.

3. Situated to the north-east of Cape Town, the Boland is the primary wine making region of South Africa. Abutting it to the north-west, lies the Swartland, a wheat-producing region.

4. In South Africa, the term coloured is an ethnic label for people of mixed ethnic origin who possess ancestry from Europe, Asia, and various Khoisan and Bantu ethnic groups of southern Africa. Although coloured people form a minority group within South Africa, they are the predominant population group in the Western Cape.

The author is mindful of the fact that the use of racial categories in South African scholarship is controversial: such categories are socially constructed and carry important social meanings. Leading South African psychological researchers have argued that the use of such categories in social research is important in that it serves to highlight the impact that apartheid had on specific groups of people (Swartz et al., 2002).