Martin Terre Blanche

Narrating Survival and Change in Guatemala and South Africa: The Politics of Representation and a Liberatory Community Psychology

Peace accords and international interventions have contributed to the suspension of armed conflict and the censuring of repressive regimes in many parts of the world. Some governments and their opposition parties have agreed to the establishment of commissions or other bodies designed to create historical records of the violations of human rights and foster conditions that facilitate reparatory and reconciliatory processes. This paper explores selected roles that community psychologists have played in this process of remembering the past and constructing new identities towards creating a more just future. With reference to two community groups (in Guatemala and South Africa) we show how efforts to “speak out” about ones own experiences of political and military repression involve complex representational politics that go beyond the simple binary opposition of silencing versus giving voice. The Guatemalan group consisted of Mayan Ixil women who, together with the first author, used participatory action research and the PhotoVoice technique to produce a book about their past and present struggles. The South African group, working within the ambit of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and in collaboration with the third author and others, explored ways of speaking about their roles in apartheid and post-apartheid society. Although both these initiatives can be seen as moments in on-going struggles to overcome externally-imposed repressive practices that censor the voices of marginalized communities, they also serve to dispel overly romanticized notions of “univocal” communities now liberated to express themselves in an unmediated and unequivocal fashion. The paper discusses how each group of women instead entered into subtly nuanced relationships with community psychologists involving a continual interplay between the authenticity of their self-representational accounts and the requirements of the discursive technologies into which they were being inducted and the material conditions within their sites of struggle. In both cases the groups agenda also evolved over time, so that what emerged was not so much a particular account of themselves, or even the development of a particular “voice” for speaking about themselves, but an unfolding process—for the groups and for the community psychologists who accompanied them—of becoming active players in the postmodern, mediated world of self-representational politics and social struggle.

Critical Psychology in South Africa: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

In this article we sketch the development, current status and future prospects of critical psychology in South Africa. We review critical psychology initiatives across a number of domains, including professional and activist organisations, university courses and programmes, conferences, and publication initiatives. In each case we show how developments in critical psychology reflected and contributed to broader social processes as South Africa emerged from apartheid. We also trace the links between local critical psychology groupings and the international critical psychology movement. Finally, we draw attention to areas (such as mental health activism, forensic psychology and community psychology) where South African critical psychologists have been relatively inactive or have played a politically ambiguous role. We conclude with suggestions for making critical psychology theory and practice relevant, not only to academic psychologists, but also to all who have a stake in South African psychology.

Critical Incidents Impact Management Among South African Police Service Officers

This article describes and interprets the law enforcement processes of managing critical incidents in a South African police district. Twenty participants from various police units were selected through purposive and theoretical sampling techniques. Data were collected using unstructured open-ended interviews, field notes, diaries and follow-up telephone interviews, and analysed through the constant comparative data analysis method. Findings suggest the police to have individual and in-group preferences for particular inner strategies of coping, as well as the external resources of relying on various forms of support from others and professional consultation in the form of debriefing. The study recommends that individualistic and contextual trauma management be considered.

Teaching Community Psychology as Community Engagement

This report describes a model for teaching community psychology as a form of community engagement and the related practices to encourage active engagement between students and their communities. As active community learners, students need to explore self, family and community as interactive social entities. We propose to encourage students with community engaged learning to become aware of their comfort zones through facilitated learning at a distance. We conclude that epistemic partnering allows the timely leveraging of existing community resources for social and psychological transformation.

Book Review: Beyondism: Religion from scienceBeyondism: Religion from scienceCattellRaymond B.New York: Praeger, 1987325 pages Approx. R100,00 (hardcover)

Knowledge of a scientist’s religious convictions should not in the normal course of events affect our assessment of his/ her academic standing. Thus Cattell’s professed belief in ‘Beyondism’ should not detract from his de fucto stature as one of scientific psychology’s great historical figures author of 450 papers, 41 books and 24 psychological tests, including the immensely popular 16 PF. However, in espousing Beyondism Cattell claims to have discovered a science of religion, thereby bracketing this latest offering together with his more conventional scientific writings. Either Cattell’s entire system comes under suspicion or we must take seriously his apparently crackpot claim that scientific psychology has the means to adjudicate between good and evil. Cattell first concocted Beyondism in the 1930s, returning to it sporadically in subsequent decades. Beyondism supposedly offers an objective route towards resolving issues such as whether racial immigration quotas are justifiable (they are) and whether homosexuality is morally defensible (probably not). Before examining how Beyondism arrives at these sorts of conclusions, here is a short list of other Beyondist ins and outs: In is: racial pride, eugenics, monogamous marriage, survival of the fittest, the segregation of humankind into separate species, and flat-rate Laxation. Ouf is: ‘feeling liberals’, international aid, the welfare state, ‘frenzied dancing and drugs’, (p. 144), ‘the cancellation of punishment by forgiveness’ (p. 155), ‘the literary and journalistic intelligentsia’ (p. 225), and ‘flagrant sexual play’ (p. 247). Cattell’s claim is that conclusions such as these may be validated by means of objective scientific research. He admits that in many cases the research has not yet been done, but he remains pretty confident that in time his hunches will be borne out. Take homosexuality, for example. Although there is as yet no Beyondist research to prove that preference for one’s own sex is without a doubt unethical, Cattell is rather certain that it should be condemned as ‘a very easy way to choose to be different’

About accountants and translators: reshaping community engagement in South African psychology

In this article, we review four key historical processes that shape community engagement and that open up spaces for its further development: The long history of tensions and cooperation between those within and outside the ‘ivory tower’, the continuing corporatisation of academic and professional life, the drive for free access to academic publications, and the drive towards decoloniality. We position community engagement as potentially disruptive to the epistemological and political status quo and present ‘four aphorisms’ for critical community engagement: Charity begins at home; it is (not) all about the money; it is all about knowledge; and you need a translator more than an accountant.

Book Review: Verryk jou kind se persoonlikheid (Enrich your child's personality)Verryk jou kind se persoonlikheid (Enrich your child's personality) Gillian Smale Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1991102 pp. R32.99 (softcover)

power coalesce to produce the subjects and objects of colonial societies. For readers already immersed in this domain of critical thought, it will represent to some an invaluable section through the archaeology of thought and action upon which contemporary South African society stands, and thus an important source for scholars of this domain. Amongst other readers, it will undoubtedly provoke fiery debate between those whose ideological and theoretical puritanism leads them to interpret as illegitimate and perhaps ingenuous the placement in close proximity to one another of essays that here construct essence and there promote dialectical materialism. However, these concerns are overshadowed by the larger question that looms after reading Treachery and innocence. This concerns the extent to which politicians, psychologists, and ordinary people apart from Manganyi are willing to contemplate and participate in the transformation he invokes from the politics of struggle to an ethic of civil accountability and partnership between professionals and with the people in the service of the public interest.