Violent crime in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

Among the advantages of psychoanalytic theory for rendering a sociohistorical critique of social and political phenomena is the fact that it unavoidably works with ‘quasi-universal’ psychic structures. This means that psychoanalytic theory is predicated on the assumption that the psychic ontogenesis of all human subjects proceeds ‘universally’ via a succession of the ‘same’ structural phases, as exemplified by what Freud dubbed the Oedipus complex, or by what Lacan termed the ‘mirror phase’. ‘Universally’ has to be qualified by the prefix ‘quasi’, however, given humanity’s inescapable subjection to historical processes. Hence, ‘quasi-universal’ indicates that, while all human beings are constituted in terms of similar psychic structures, the functioning of these structures is itself historically reconfigured via changing social, economic and political circumstances. In cultures where there are no mirrors, for example, infants negotiate the ‘mirror phase’ in ways that do not involve mirrors in the literal sense, but the place of which is taken by a different medium of ‘self-reflection’, such as the reflecting surface of water, the ritual assessment of the self by others (‘You are correctly dressed’) and so on. Or, to bring it closer to the contemporary era, the ‘social dialectic’ of secondary identification (e.g. in a school situation) that follows in the wake of the mirror phase is complicated, today, by the ubiquity of the mass media, where thousands of celebrity images offer themselves as sites of identification for subjects. One could also employ the term ‘quasi-transcendental’ to indicate that these (interrelated) psychic structures facilitate certain relational modes and actions (‘universally’) on the part of subjects, but simultaneously comprise the conditions of possibility of their particular embodiment, as well as their distortion and perversion, in their specific articulation in individuals’ lives. Conversely, the historical conditions of individuals’ lives provide the indispensable ‘material’ anchoring points for these quasi-transcendental structures, without which they could not function, or even be said to exist.