On Being and Becoming: Thinking Historical Trauma Through Language and the Body Thando Njovane

Respondent: Peter Nevins (Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis)

Chair: Fiona Yaron-Field (Guild of Psychotherapists)

This is the latest instalment in the series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to the academic decolonial work. In this seminar, Thando Njovane analyses the persistence of destructive and entrenched patterns of Being and relating in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Please note that a recording of the seminar will be available to ticket-holders for a full year after the event.

Image caption
A scene from Long Street, Cape Town, 2025

About this seminar

On Being and Becoming: Thinking Historical Trauma Through Language and the Body Thando Njovane

In this presentation, I reflect on embodiment and its relation to historical trauma in South Africa, arguing that the fragmented psycho-social structure which characterises the contemporary moment is bound up with colonial and apartheid repetitions. These repetitions, I argue, are located in readings of the body as a site of familiarity and estrangement, of connection and disconnection, and, ultimately, as a psycho-social barometer of recognition and its obverse. Misrecognition of (or the refusal to recognise) another has far-reaching implications for the ways in which we read both ourselves and others in our shared socio-political spaces. While colonialism and apartheid serve as stark examples of misrecognition – and therefore the impairment of ethical action, as Emmanuel Levinas would have it – the psycho-social life of embodied subjects in contemporary South Africa reveals the ongoing impact of a historically embedded wilful rejection of ethical relations.

Speakers’ Biographies

Dr Thando Njovane is a Senior Lecturer and Andrew Mellon scholar at Rhodes University, South Africa, where she teaches literature. She is currently working on her first monograph titled Trauma Theory and Childhoods in African Fiction, a project for which she has recently been awarded the prestigious Iso Lomso fellowship by the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study (STIAS). Her current research interests include postcolonialisms, trauma theory, psychoanalysis, ghosts, and intimacy.

Njovane, who is also the early career coordinator at the Rhodes African Studies Center, has published in top international journals such as the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Research in African Literatures, and has contributed to edited collections published by established publishers like Cambridge University Press, Brill, and Wits University Press, to name but a few.

Peter Nevins has been practising as a Psychoanalyst in private practice since 1995. He holds a Doctorate in Clinical Science (Psychotherapy) from the University of Kent and he teaches across several psychoanalytic training organisations.

Between 1988 and 2020, he worked extensively within London’s mental health services and was a founding member of the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. From 2001 until December 2020, he served as Chief Executive Officer of Islington Mind, a London-based mental health charity.

In addition to his psychoanalytic work, he is an accredited Alternative Dispute Resolution Mediator with experience in both organisational mediation and the mediation of therapeutic impasses between patients and clinicians.

His current areas of interest lie at the intersection of phenomenology and psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on how the disciplines of philosophy and psychology can deepen and extend our understanding and practice of psychoanalytic work.

Bursary tickets

A limited number of bursary tickets are available on a pay-what-you-can basis to people who would not be able to attend without financial assistance. To apply for a bursary ticket please email ivan_talks@guildofpsychotherapists.org.uk. Thank you.

A recording will be available for ticket buyers for a full year after the event.

Certificates of Attendance available on request.

Organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists.