South Africa Collection |
No.1: Reflections on the South African SituationAbstractA collection of seminal ideas, insights and reflections on the dynamics of South Africa. Subjects range from the complexity of polarisation to the role of world citizen in the Global Village; from unconscious sexual fears and guilt in the black/white relationship, to the dynamics of the Jewish community in the Cape; from paranoid processes and the need for personal integration to the paradoxical psychosis of religion; from the cultural fixation of the expatriate communities to the realistic hope of inter-racial cellular networks; from the application of Catastrophe Theory to the insights of Systems Analysis. |
No.2: Kairos in QuestionAbstractThe ‘KAIROS Document’ is one of the most significant contributions to the South African debate to emerge from grassroots theological reflection in the Province. This analytic response exposes some of the logical, theological and psychological fault lines in the document. The serious question is raised as to whether the church’s response to apartheid is not in itself a mirror of the same system. A higher level of systems analysis is called for, one which resolves the roots of splitting in the social process rather than simply shifting the pain in a conversion reaction from one side of the split to the other. |
No.3: Response to 'Black and Gold' by Anthony Sampson'AbstractPowerful parallels are drawn between the Jew and Nazi, Black and Afrikaner. The emergence of perinatal dynamics in social process is noted at the boundaries of complex racial and political groups suffering resource lack, and external threat. International capitalism drives and reinforces the bifurcation in wealth distribution which cuts even more deeply than apartheid into the South African culture, so calling in question the potential contribution of big business and multi-national corporations. Afrikaner religious ideology justifies a regime which has become an intra-national mirror of inter-national dynamics. Systemic interventions in psychodynamic and ideological levels are likely to have a more profound and long-lasting positive effect than can ever be achieved by revolutionary confrontation. |
No.4: Response to 'Black and Reformed' by Allan BoesakAbstractBoesak’s brilliant exposition of liberation theology in the reformed tradition is sharply interfaced with a dynamic analysis of the psychotic elements implicit in the very ground of religion itself. The suggestion is made that the Christian religion and the inter-group strife in South Africa are mirror codifications of the same primitive processes of psychotic human defences. |
No.5: Response to 'Poor Man, Rich Man' by Peter LeeAbstractThe book is a searching Christian analysis of the South African situation and the role of the churches in its resolution. It is written by a white, English-speaking clergyman recently appointed as a Bishop in the Church of the Province. This response homes in on the assumptions, dynamics, splits and paradoxical contradictions embedded in the heart of the Church. South Africa is described as a microcosm of the global process used as a scapegoat in the dynamics of international apartheid. Change processes, defences and regression in the church parallel similar dynamics in its social context. Increasing the levels of anxiety and terror is seen as a counter-productive strategy in an attempt to move towards greater human wholeness. |
No.6: Response to 'South Africa Without Apartheid' by Heribert Adam and Kogila MoodleyAbstractIn this response paper, the sharp sociological, social, economic and ideological analyses of the authors are taken to a new level as the psychological roots of the social dynamics are exposed. Alternative strategies for catalysing change in conflicted complex systems are explored and the importance of access to the core symbolic levels of ideology (racial, political and religious) is stressed. 
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