The Psychologist Adventurer

Maps Mapoyane and Gail Womersley

Earlier this year Gail Womersley gave a talk to the Cape Town Self-psychology group (CTPSPG) about her 2 years working with Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). It turned out that we were extremely fortunate to hear this plucky young clinical psychologist. MSF, recognising her qualities - she is creative, culturally sensitive, eloquent and charismatic - had sent her on an event-packed fund-raising tour to raise money for their projects in the war-torn Central African Republic.

It seems that self-psychology still provides something of an emotional and theoretical touchstone for Gail. With MSF, she had moved far into the field of trauma response in a very short space of time and probably felt the need for recognition and understanding from her former colleagues and mentors. I think she got that - we were spellbound. She had raised the question of whether the kind of short-term work she was doing was ethically acceptable from the viewpoint of promoting the kind of changes to which long-term therapy aspires. A question I felt plagued by myself at the Trauma Centre where I often felt that I was dispensing plasters for wounds that were never going to heal. I don't think many of us were too concerned about addressing, let alone answering such a question - it was the riveting adventure of it all that was so gripping.