Long looks at violence through psychoanalytic lens

• Author: Chantel Erfort chantel.erfort@inl.co.za
• Published date: 15 July 2021
• Publication title: Athlone News

With these words, clinical psychologist Wahbie Long concludes our interview. I had asked him if he had any parting shots.

It’s a great way to finish, I tell him. And, actually, I add, a great place to start.

The reference to planting that tree of course, is to the Chinese aphorism that, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

The 40-year-old Rondebosch resident who grew up in Walmer Estate, is currently riding a wave of popularity following the release of Nation on the Couch in which he turns his psycho-analytic gaze on violence in South Africa.

The book, he tells me, was written mostly in coffee shops during the early part of last year while he was on sabbatical. “And then the world changed,” he says. “Lockdown hit in March and I had to go home and look after my three kids.”

At this point, he says, the project came to an abrupt end, everything written, except the conclusion, which he was determined would not be reduced to “some kind of Hollywood ending”.

While the final product is very different from the Freudo-Marxist academic text he had initially been working on, he feels that Nation on the Couch as a cross-over text increases its accessibility.

And, has the interest in the book surprised him? Yes, he says.

“It definitely has.

“But I suppose that’s what I was gunning for by writing it as a cross-over text. I was hoping that it wouldn’t just be academics who would engage with this book.

“I think it speaks to my motivation for writing it. I intended it, in part, as an act of citizenship.”

As for who he hopes will access this work, he says: “My audience is really any South African who is concerned about the astonishing levels of violence in this country… and I mean violence in the broadest possible sense – whether we’re talking about interpersonal, gender-based, symbolic or economic violence.

“It’s really about helping ordinary South Africans who are wondering about this problem and what is driving it from a psychological perspective – and how we might begin to address it from a psychological perspective.”

So, does Long feel the answer to South Africa’s “astonishing levels of violence” lies in psychology?

Not solely, he says.

“Looking at the situation in South Africa from a psychological perspective is only one part of the solution.

“If one looks at commentaries about the South African situation, they typically focus on the politics and economics of it all and we lose sight of the so-called small things – the...