A diverse panel of practitioners – clinical, organisational, and counselling psychologists offered engaging presentations, all critiquing dominant constructions and discourses of therapeutic practice, but each providing a very different angle to exploring the implications of systemic oppression, historical and contemporary and the possibilities for collective healing. We questioned the extent to which a race-based trauma cycle might be ingrained into South African consciousness and asked what it is that needs to be healed, not only from the past, but in the current context of a neoliberal democracy. We were encouraged to examine language and relations of power by imagining psychology in our own African languages outside of the confines of English and questioning what harm we cause when we expect our clients to ‘meet us where we are’.  We heard of the generative possibilities at the interface of psychoanalytic praxis and African spirituality, where object relations include ancestral objects in particular ways and where Umoya (spirit) can be a diagnostic tool. Frameworks of working with trauma were reframed drawing on more contextually relevant ways of becoming more political in our psychological and psychosocial work within communities. There was rich storytelling in all presentations and some interesting questions from delegates.

In the first Invited Panel, Global Indigenous Psychologies: Movement toward healing Historical Harms, Prof Peace Kiguwa, Prof Malose Langa, Dr Mmatshilo Motsei and Mr Anele Siswana explore the question of whose knowledge is considered existent or valid as central to the project of indigenizing and decolonising psychology. In this dialogue session, the panelists consider the question of ‘who knows’ in discussions around self-care, trauma healing and building healthy communities. Drawing on their own practice, the panelists explored indigenous epistemologies as critical responses to trauma in communities. Drawing links to the many political and social intersections that continue to proliferate in society, the discussions considered problematics of femicide and GBV, community fragmentation, emotional disconnect, trauma, homophobia, poverty as part of historical harm. In considering historical harm, the panelists cautioned against the dangers of ‘psychologising’ deeply political and social problems that are legacies of historical harms. Part of this caution is to attend to the ways that apolitical approaches to trauma inadvertently victim-blame and pathologise the very traumatized individuals and communities we seek to be of service to. In the engagement with the broader audience, the conversation extended to reflect on psychology’s roots in apolitical forms of thinking and practising, the pretense to objectivity and neutral value-free science, and its emphasis on western traditions of therapy and thinking that fail to really ‘see’ the human beings it attempts to help. Drawing on their own forms of practice, the panelists invited the audience to reflect on how we can do psychology differently and how indigenous psychologies offer us something that we have sidelined for a long time.

In his lecture at the 27th Annual South African Psychology Congress, hosted by the Psychological Society of South Africa (PsySSA), Francis B. Nyamnjoh emphasizes the urgent need for convivial scholarship in the field of healing. He argues that despite the independence of most African countries since the 1960s, colonial education, culture, and attitudes still persist, overshadowing indigenous healing traditions that have remained resilient yet largely unrecognized in the 21st century. Nyamnjoh advocates for a framework of decolonized healing practices that promote conversations and collaborations across various disciplines and organizations. He stresses the importance of integrating marginalized epistemologies rooted in popular universes and ideas of reality into the academic discourse. Central to his argument is the recognition and accommodation of incompleteness in individuals, disciplines, organizations, and knowledge-making traditions, challenging the illusion of completeness often perpetuated by zero-sum games of violence and violation. Instead, he calls for embracing compositeness and conviviality in healing practices while rejecting the outsourcing of debt and indebtedness to victims.

Therapies for Healing Justice: Redressing Systemic Oppression and Intergenerational Trauma

Panelists: Dr Sipho Dlamini, Ms Rejane Williams, Ms Thembelihle Mashigo & Ms Berenice Meintjes
Chair: Dr Jude Clark

Abstract

In alignment with the conference theme, this panel asks what a decolonial, healing justice can look like in relation to therapeutic practice. The conversation between practitioners explores the implications of systemic oppression, both historical and contemporary and the possibilities for collective healing. It considers the multifaceted issue of language and/in therapy, modalities of indigenous healing as therapeutic resource and the successes and challenges of community-based interventions for collective trauma recovery and healing. Rejane Williams invites interrogation of the limitations of Northwestern-centric models of psychological intervention and explores the kinds of approaches needed to tend to the historical and ongoing wounds of generational alienation and trauma, including racial trauma. Dr Sipho Dlamini considers the value of indigenous language in the therapeutic context and what becomes possible in moving beyond the dominance of English towards a more socially just encounter in the therapy space. Drawing from experience of working at the interface of indigenous healing and psychotherapeutic practice, Gogo Thembelihle Mashigo explores how therapies of Umoya (Spirit) offer a process based on a multiplicity of being, beyond the individual. Berenice Meintjies shares vignettes from the work of Sinani, an organisation engaged with psychosocial interventions for recovery from violence, to describe the dilemmas of decolonizing and contextualizing healing approaches in community-based trauma interventions.

Global Indigenous Psychologies: Movement toward healing historical harms

Panelists: Prof Malose Langa, Dr Mmatshilo Motsei and Mr Anele Siswana
Chair: Prof Peace Kiguwa

Abstract 

There is an imperative for a psychology of healing and self-determination that considers the ubiquitous nature of trauma today. The marginalization of Indigenous approaches to trauma and healing remains a critical site to interrogate disconnections to rich traditions and practices of healing. In this panel dialogue, three speakers engage these dis/connections, with a view to reimagining healing, trauma’s complex hold on communities, and imaginations for a healing psychology. There is a recognition that healing is itself a complex process of renewal, recovery, and refusal; that addressing psycho-social effects of neoliberal economies that are complicit in the erosion of communities remains fundamental to wellbeing, and that trauma as disconnection is political in form. The question of how we engage these entanglements is the concern of the speakers in the panel. Speaking from their respective practices as practitioners, activists and scholars, the speakers address themselves to the questions of trauma, community building, and healing. In turning to indigenous psychologies, they also address alternate rich traditions and approaches to healing that psychology as profession may do well to attend to.