Preparing to Land

Imagine this: It's five days before Xmas. Nineteen people, mostly Capetonians, arrive at Bloemfontein airport to catch a plane back to Cape Town. They all know each other in a very specific context - they dance together. They have been dancing with 120 others for 5 days. Its not your ordinary kind of gyrate on the dance floor to rock or fast stepping twirls like salsa or even the erotic engagement of the tango, although it can encompass any of these. Its Biodanza - a way of freely expressing oneself to music and it includes contact and sensuality.

We are in the departure lounge. Our departure time comes and goes - we are not called. Eventually we discover that if only our plane had not switched its engines off, we could have taken off. But since they did switch off, we can't. There is a defective part for which we will have to wait. We begin to get to know each other in ways we never have before - about our lives and work. We have quite a bit of fun. At about the time we should have arrived in Cape Town, SAA finally decides to put us up at a hotel for the night and we will have to fly to Johannesburg (JHB) on the morrow to get to Cape Town - a route which is counter-intuitive to any normal modes of thinking other than that of airlines. This is devastating news for one or two (like some Italians who have to make their connection to Rome for Xmas) but not really for most of us - it being the holiday season.

Sometimes it can get Crowded in the Consulting Room

Painting by Ken -Artist Kim Noble's alter 

I was catapulted into the then-uncharted territory of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - previously multiple personality disorder - one day in the early 70's, when a woman client I had been seeing for almost 2 years, came for her regular session and remarked that I had painted my walls a different colour and wasn't there someone who played the piano in one of the other rooms of the flat? I was a bit taken aback - I hadn't had any painting done recently and no-one lived in that room any more. In those days, I was a recently qualified psychotherapist and much as it pains me to admit it, I took notes in sessions. On this particular day it stood me in good stead. Writing down her observations helped me to think. I'd seen and read "The Three Faces of Eve", I'd seen "Sybil". Was I sitting with such a person? "When were you last here?" I asked - as of-course anyone would, who was certain they'd seen their client for their usual session the previous week! "I came once when She was drunk," came the immediate insouciant reply.

Community Organisation Prioritises Individual Counselling

CASE (Community Action towards a Safer Environment) is a unique NGO located in the Hanover Park community on the Cape Flats. This is an area ridden with gang violence. In the short time that I have been marginally involved with this organisation, (since August 2010) there have been two major outbreaks of violence. Unfortunately, it is often young children who get caught in the crossfire. But the whole situation used to be much worse. The improvement could well be due to the existence of this organisation, which is housed in a few cream-coloured containers in the grounds of Mountview High School. The person who provides the firing passion behind this community-development-engine is Lane Benjamin, a clinical psychologist, mother of two, currently completing her Ph.D. She started CASE about 10 years ago while still working at the Trauma Centre.

End of year graduation party of the Literacy Group

On 28th September 2011, CASE went public. They launched a series of Training Manuals and Workshops hoping to spread their development model to other community organisations.  

So what makes them special?
I think what distinguishes this organisation is 1) they start with individuals and their personal development, 2) they incorporate an understanding of the impact of trauma on learning and 3) expertise develops and remains within the community.

I would guess that their premise - that to break the cycle of violence you have to start with individuals and their personal development - might not be very popular currently with government or with funders. The theory that informs this is that most South African communities are traumatised firstly by the degradations of the past, which have been passed on to later generations through intergenerational transmission of trauma, and secondly, by the continuous violence in the present. The major ways in which this is manifest in each family is through dissociation, addictions, family violence and learning difficulties

Libyan Psychoanalyst Tries to go to Shul

Libyan Jewish exile David Gerbi breaks the sealed entrance to Dar Bishi synagogue.

David Gerbi, who hit the headlines this week, is a psychoanalyst. He is also a consummate performer, a refugee peace envoy and a Libyan Jew. This week he also turned out to be a canny activist in the views of some, or an ill-timed opportunist in the views of others.
 In the week that Libya's National Transitional Council (NTC) was preparing their final onslaught on Sirte, Gerbi, who had entered Tripoli with the rebels in August, decided to take brooms, rakes, buckets and cleaning materials to start restoring Tripoli's crumbling main synagogue which has been unused for decades. He started the clean-up on Sunday. By Wednesday the building was padlocked but Gerbi had made his stand. Probably knowing that revolutions provide only a short-lived window of opportunity for openness, he had decided to test the NTC for its democratic intent. Would Jews be welcome in the new Libya? Some say his test came too early - that's certainly the line of the NTC. Only time will tell. Maybe he wanted to be able to pray there on Yom Kippur - the Jewish day of Atonement - the holiest day of the year. In fact, I wonder where he has spent Yom Kippur today?

Is this the End of the "Butch Dyke"?

"Anne Lister, (1791-1840) the First Modern Lesbian"

This is uncharted territory for me – possibly even a minefield, given my heading. Nevertheless I want to speak my mind – or at least write what happened in my attempt to think, after I heard two speakers talk on transgender issues at the conference I attended in New York. I'm writing this post to try to make sense of an issue that puzzled and confused me. Why would I do this - especially since it includes labelling, stereotyping, generalising and probably being politically incorrect....? I'd love to know what this article evokes for you. So I invite you to comment.

After talking to several people after the conference, I conclude that I am probably not the only one who might be confused. Other than possibly a few science fiction writers and their readers, mutability of gender confounds most of us. Not that I hadn’t heard about the ‘T’ of LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) before. I just ignored it as a really minority issue that I would never have to take on board.

Some great movies!

There are two really lovely Korean films about childhood separation and attachment, both made by women: So Yong Kim's "Treeless Mountain" and Lee Jeong-Hyang's "The Way Home". I saw the latter on SABC a couple of week's ago. These make quite good alternatives to the famous Robertson documentaries which were made at the Tavistock Institute and were quite expensive to acquire when I last tried about 10 years ago. "The Way Home" also tackles how shocking the differences between urban and rural life could be for a child, spoilt by the consumerism of the city.


A film that manages to eschew the usual good/bad polarities in its main protagonist and at the same time gives a sobering picture of the plight of illegal immigrants in France is "Welcome" by Philippe Lioret.

Finally, a really fascinating documentary made by Chris Rock called "Good Hair" about the billion dollar hair industry servicing Afro-Americans in the USA.

The American Psychological Association's Complicity in Torture

During the Bystanders No More conference, we were privileged to hear a presentation by Steven Reisner. Together with colleagues, who formed the Coalition for an Ethical APA, he has tirelessly fought over the past 5 years to expose the complicity of psychologists and other health professionals in the torture of detainees in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and centres within the USA. He talked about the shift from bystander to witness and ultimately activist - roles with which some of us in South Africa are familiar in our own personal histories.

Complicity of South African Health Professionals during Apartheid
South Africa has a vicious history of torture and also experienced complicity of health professionals - both prison doctors and psychologists.

Becoming a Witness

Charles Strozier at the NY Academy of Medicine.

One of the plenary presentations at the Bystanders No More conference was by Charles B. Strozier. He had interviewed survivors and bystanders of 9/11. On the large screen behind the podium he projected images of what happened that day and in the days thereafter - images most people had only seen on their small TV screens. Some were familiar to me, others not - I didn't have a TV in those days. The photograph that stood out for me more than any other, was one taken outside the nearest hospital to the World Trade Centre. It showed a big clutch of green-coated doctors and nurses just waiting. They waited all day apparently - no-one came. There were almost no casualties of 9/11. Only the dead and the survivors. For the first time ever, this became a real event to me -

Why "Bystanders No More"?

An astonishing story lies behind the conference I attended in New York in May this year. Its a story about a largely hidden genocide of 100 years ago and the effect of its horrors on the silenced and unacknowledged survivors. A story of how this history was put centre stage by a second-generation survivor and what her colleagues then did about it. A story also of healing, generosity of spirit and reconciliation.

So, what happened?
The last International Self Psychology Conference was held in Turkey in October 2010. Present at the previous US conference in 2009, where the next venue was announced, was an analyst, the daughter of a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915-23.

Back Home!

Apologies to readers out there for my silence. I had no idea beforehand how important a peaceful Friday is to my blogging career. And there were none of those while I was travelling. Consequently I have many topics to post because it was a very stimulating trip.

Not least the TRISP Conference in New York where I started. Before I get into it - and I think there will probably be about 4 postings on that alone - perhaps travellers to JFK might like to know that the queue at the border was 2 hours long in early May. They fingerprint both hands and take a picture of every entrant. They probably didn't realise that my fingertips are so worn down I don't have any fingerprints left - something I discovered when trying to renew my driver's licence recently.  Thus began my life of crime. (Someone should warn the police to watch out for aging criminals!) I took an illegal picture while waiting in the queue on my new Blackberry before an official came to tell me off. I will post it when I figure out how to transfer the photo.

Should Individual Counselling be a Luxury? Re-Evaluation Counselling

Re-Evaluation Counselling (RC) is a form of peer counselling and is also often called co-counselling. All participants are trained in the theory and techniques so that although co-counsellors may differ in levels of experience, we meet and session together as equals. Its the only practice of human growth and development I know, which places the hurts caused by socio-cultural oppression (starting with the oppression of parents and young people and including racism, classism, sexism etc.), at the core of human distress and imparts a number of methods and group processes to address these.

Re-Evaluation Counselling isn't a luxury. The training is affordable and once you've learnt it, its free.You can have a session in many countries on the planet with another RCer and it will only cost the price of the trip you paid to get there. Workshops cost, but that's your choice.
One of  the most important features of co-counselling is the emphasis on emotional release.

A Cape Town Day

I didn't see any!

Sometimes one gets far more than one seeks. And in Cape Town this is often true. Take for example the morning traffic jam up Paradise Road, Newlands. There the mountain looms close overhead, every detail etched by the morning sun. It beats Los Angeles or London, doesn't it? So last Friday, there I was having breakfast, preparing to spend the morning writing, when I heard on the radio that there were dolphins chasing fish in Simonstown harbour.
This might happen quite frequently but us landlubbers in Plumstead don't always know about it. I thought I'd go and have a look.
When I got there, I couldn't see anything out at sea, but it was a

glorious day so I wandered. There was a sign saying Mosque, uphill from the Main Road. In the paving of the lane, there was a motif, looking like something one might find in Glasgow by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. As I walked up, I saw that the design was picked up in the stained glass windows of the building at the top - an Art Deco mosque! Built in 1911, with the minaret added in 1925. A shopkeeper told me that the Heritage museum was interesting. This was in a house called Amlay and the signs said 'closed on Friday'. But I could hear someone in the garden so I asked him if it really was closed, because the front door behind the security gate was open. He said "Try ringing the bell." So I did. After a short while a woman came to the door.

Women's Bodies (part II)

Video highlights of Endangered Species gives a taste of what the London summit was like. Why 'Endangered Species'? Susie Orbach says: The young woman who can feel free to explore her interests without being preoccupied by how her body appears or focus on what procedure she should have in the future to change it, is becoming an ‘endangered species’.

Sibongile Khumalo - jazz and classical singer

Here in South Africa we still have a multiplicity of images of women that inspire us, but for young women they are fading fast. The quest for the perfect body is in the ascendancy. As Susie says, Body Hatred is one of the West's most nefarious exports. Look at this ad. for deodorant in which Lira, a hugely popular singer in our country especially among young women, says: The whole world is like a stage and I have to look perfect all the time.....We are being manipulated to use a product which has nothing to do with looks, the inference being that if we perspire less we can be perfect like Lira. What is implied about the natural propensities of our bodies to perspire and for that matter smell, is just another well-known addition to the catalogue of Body Hatred. For a wonderful contrast to all of this take a look at the football grannies, who have also been used in advertisements. However young women are not the target of these. 
I wonder if people know of some other South African examples of Body Hatred production that they'd like to share?

Should Individual Counselling Be a Luxury?

From "The Gift Returned" by Lauraine Vivian

For many years, post-TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission), there has been hardly any funding for individual trauma counselling. The directors and management at the Trauma Centre (and probably other NGO’s) had to be creative in how they could permit counselling programs to continue. No-one on the staff doubted the need for it and many of us were invested in it. By invested, I mean that we had been trained to do individual work and believed in it. Besides, it had taken at least 10 years of mental health education to make trauma counselling into a service that poor and working class people would seek, let alone find accessible. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s the Trauma Centre’s Training Department played a part in this. It offered widely disseminated Trauma Skills programs to front-line workers. But prior to those programs, OASSSA, provided services to ex-detainees and their families even before the Trauma Centre existed.
The imparting of various forms of emotional literacy also happened in workshops provided to many workers during the 90’s. These were intended to fuel the transformational agendas of various sectors, e.g. public service, the army, the police, and other emergency personnel.

These efforts reached their apex in the trauma counselling culture that developed around the TRC. In 1996, when I met with Thulani Granville-Grey who was involved with the Human Rights Violation Committee of the TRC, he showed me his list of victim requests. I was surprised to see that counselling was prominent among them.

Now the global economic crunch has relegated individual counselling and therapy to the realm of the luxurious –services a developing society can presumably ill afford to indulge. And yet the need remains. I have recently participated in a worldwide e-mail colloquium of the International Association of Relational Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IARPP). In it we discussed traumas of history and war. The need for a respectful, patient, nuanced approach to each individual with their own unique history, was so sensitively articulated by many experienced practitioners that I wonder how we can go about effecting the kind of mass scale of recovery that is required in this country. Why should only those who can afford it have the individual attention that most people need? Is everyone else supposed to make do with groups, workshops and “community healing”? I’m not saying those don’t also have their place, but it’s not enough, is it?

Human Rights Day and the Under-recognition of Robert Sobukwe

On March 21st – Human Rights Day – one of the rights we celebrate is the right of every South African citizen to move about freely in the country of their birth.
Fifty-one years ago, this was not the case – most South Africans by birth were not citizens, and the movements of all black South African men were severely restricted by the laws which governed the passes they were obliged to carry.

Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe

On March 21st 1960, nonviolent protests against the pass laws were initiated by a new organization - the Pan Africanist Congress. Thousands of people gathered at police stations to burn their passes and to present themselves for arrest.
At Sharpeville a large gathering of unarmed protestors was fired on by apartheid police. 69 people were killed and many more wounded. This massacre changed the nature of the struggle in South Africa. Within a week the country was mobilized – there were mass protests, demonstrations and strikes.

Tutu, Human Rights and the Human Genome Project

Last week, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu by citing his sequenced genome pointed out how ridiculous racism really is. " I am related to the San people, so I am coloured." he said at UWC, poking fun into the current debate about how jobs should be allocated in different regions of the country. (That is, according to national racial demographics and not taking into account regional population differences)
The Human Genome Project (HGP) has provided us with the kind of information that makes me think differently about us human beings. For one thing, despite all our languages, different cultures and allegiances, we are all Africans! I love that about us. Furthermore, the most ancient genes on our planet are carried right here amongst the San people of the Namib.

The HGP was funded because it was marketed as being able to provide insights about non-communicable diseases and it is doing this more and more rapidly and also more cheaply than it did 10 years ago. This history is well documented and if you read the link, you will probably think like I did, that it'd make a terrific movie.

There are however, human rights implications that interest me just as much as the idea that drugs could be designed to counteract my particular version of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's which is probably where I am headed.

International Women's Day

This year it is being said that March 8 was the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day and that is why many organisations are coming together in this month in an international effort to re-examine issues of women's oppression. This is what Susie Orbach had to say about the work that still needs to be done after the London summit of "Endangered Species": 
Girls don’t see themselves reflected and so they try to change themselves to mimic what they see. Last Friday in London, young women from all over the country came together to show us what they are doing to combat this tyranny and to create a new visual culture. There was joy in the room as they showed their fight back and dared to love their bodies. We all vowed to stop the trafficking of body hatred throughout the world. It is not an easy struggle. It can be written off as trivial. But it isn’t. We all know it eats away at us. That’s why we are campaigning. Join with us to get our bodies back.

What do women commemorate on March 8th?

Women's Bodies

An extraordinary event is about to take place in London, Buenos Aires and other cities across the planet – an international summit on how our bodies are shaped and controlled by outside influences - the media, the dietmongers, the passion for makeovers in the entertainment industry, the arts, increasing use of plastic surgery by celebrities, the fashion industry – the list is endless.
Presumably inspired by the song by Dianne Reeves the summit is called "Endangered Species". It has been initiated by former colleagues of mine – Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum - who started The Women’s Therapy Centre in London and the Women’s Therapy Centre Institute in New York City in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

 

New Brooms

At the end of last year Njabulo Ndebele wrote about shake-ups in the ANC in an article in the Mail & Guardian entitled “Toxic politics: diary of a bad year.” He asked how successful societies replicate their success over time? His answer is that, “They provide opportunities for their citizens for seamless cross-generational interactions within the network of private and public institutions that give definition to national effort.” 
  This hasn't been a feature of recent South African political life: “Consider the sudden and unplanned departure of then-president Thabo Mbeki, when the ANC threw away in an instant years of institutional knowledge. It was more than an individual who left. A body of knowledge and experience did too, regardless of how they may have been understood.” As a result he continues, “younger members of the ANC have little access to an aspect of their organisation’s contemporary history.” He believes, “A deep chasm has emerged in the interactive space between one generation and another, which will take years to rebuild.”

This reminded me of an organization with which I am familiar and in which the staff turnover is high.

Assimilation in "The Finkler Question"

This very clever and often hilarious book written by Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize in 2010. It takes a look at the different Jewish identities that exist in Britain today but particularly in intellectual North London. These identities are once again foregrounded and called into question in the wake of the Israeli attack on Gaza.
One of the themes in the book that interested me is that it takes a serious look at assimilationist tendencies in British liberal Jewry by turning assimilation on its head. We have the protagonist, a Gentile who wants to become a Jew. He feeds off what he perceives is the tragedy and suffering of the Jewish people and wants to acquire their knowingness of each other and to somehow make it in the Jewish world.

Much more common of-course, is the Jew who wants to pass in the Gentile world – who becomes a kind of chameleon, a Zelig (reminiscent of the film by Woody Allen).

Trauma Centre Reunion – October 2010

After I resigned from the Trauma Centre in May last year, I had the feeling that there was hardly anyone left working there to whom I needed or wanted to say goodbye. All the colleagues I’d been close to had already left years before. Perhaps many people who work in NGOs for more than a few years have had a similar experience?
Anyway, I decided I would construct my own farewell reunion. So finally in early October 2010 – after Eid and the Jewish holidays – 13 of us met on my patio for a Saturday lunch. A big coincidence/surprise was that Potiphar Nkhoma, who started working at the Trauma Centre pretty much at the same time as I did in 2001, just happened to be in the country from the USA and he turned up.

l.to r: Jackie Stewart, Siyabulela Mkabile, Potiphar Nkhoma, Emma Oliver, Kailas Kassan-Newton, Carmen Low-Shang, Haseena Parker, Robyn Rowe, Kerry Magnus. Seated: Lane Benjamin, Sarah Crawford-Browne, Margaret Green

I was sorry that some people who had been very important to me were unable to come – Dr Gordon Isaacs, who introduced me to trauma work (South African style) and supervised me for years, Maria Stacey, the first co-ordinator I had when I joined the Intake team and Eric Harper, who believed in me enough to hand over the work he was doing with Khulumani – an experience from which I learned so much. They had other commitments, as did Wanga Zembe, who was in Oxford ‘defending’ her Ph.D.

The Archie Mafeje Exhibition

In October 2010, I was involved in an exhibition which travelled to 3 South African universities and will eventually be housed at Walter Sisulu University.  It is an exhibition about Archie Mafeje as a young man. A history professor from UWC, Andrew Bank, in researching the work of South African women anthropologists, became interested in the collaborative relationship that UCT Professor Monica Wilson developed with her student and researcher, Archie Mafeje in the early 60’s. He first interviewed me about him sometime in early 2009. I had written a page about how I’d known Archie and what I valued about him for a special issue of CODESRIA Bulletin, issued after he died, entitled “A giant has moved on: Archie Mafeje (1936-2007)”, honoring his life and scholarship. It was as a result of what I wrote there that Andrew contacted me.

I probably first met Archie in 1958 in the company of other left-wing students.